


Going Viral

by SignificantOtter



Series: Hold With the Hare, Run With the Hound [2]
Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Case Fic, F/M, Puns & Word Play, Science, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-06-08 07:54:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 20,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6846001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SignificantOtter/pseuds/SignificantOtter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Judy and Nick delve deep into the Nocturnal District, and into the worlds of Zootopia’s least-understood residents.</p><p>Also featured: animal puns. So many animal puns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Sunquistadora for being my betareader/editor!
> 
> And if you haven't read the first part of the series, you'll be just fine. But a quick primer on the original characters: Hadley is the anxious koala DJ who lives next-door to Nick, and Ursula is a wombat engineer who won over Judy with her adorable cub.

“Again, we regret to report that the demonstration of our rescue winch has been delayed,” announced the dutifully perky voice over the loudspeaker. “Our MedLick chopper had to respond to a call,” it continued apologetically, echoing over the heads and whiskers of the milling, family-friendly crowds. “Our MedLick crew, doing what they do best! Helping mammals in need.”

Judy looked out towards the landing pad, as a fashionable kinkajou couple retrieved their damselfly kebab from one of the scattered, half-dozen food trucks parked nearby. Hunched over the counter, the teenage hyrax’s well-mussed apron sported a trendy, minimalist logo that read, “Humps & Trunks: Camel-Elephant Fusion Cuisine.” A “baobab leaf curry” cost thirteen dollars. Fifteen, if you got it with dates and bamboo shoots.

Judy turned her attention back to the mildly crestfallen koala, sipping on an overpriced eucalyptus smoothie on the other side of a cheap folding table. “I have to say,” Judy marveled gently, stroking the fur of Nick’s arm as it rested in her other paw. “I didn’t know you were such a fangirl for medical rescue, Hadley.” The koala flicked her eyes up to the rabbit and fox across from her and shrugged, her cicada-print bowtie waggling between the lapels of her unbuttoned herringbone vest.

“Kind of absorbed it through osmosis, I guess.” Hadley fished around with her straw for the last lingering drops of viscous leaf juice. “My father worked as a bush pilot for the fire service before we moved.” She swept one paw at the parked aircraft and placards that ringed the exhibition hangar for the Whingz Air and Space Museum, now chockablock with information booths and volunteer sign-ups for medical organizations that had come out in solidarity with the annual MedLick fundraiser. “You can only go for so many spins in a gyrocopter before you’re hooked.”

“One of the kits at daycare once convinced me I could fly, if I whipped my tail fast enough,” Nick recounted, as Judy suppressed a snort. The three mammals cleared their table and meandered over in the general direction of the compost bins. “My mother only caught me because I laid out all my stuffed animals in the apartment building courtyard to watch my inaugural take-off.” He grinned at the look on Hadley’s face, newly mortified and silently assessing him for healed skull fractures. “We lived on the second story,” he assured her. “It wouldn’t have been so bad.”

“Are you a blood donor, Hadley?” Judy asked politely, as the koala deposited her rubbish a handful of steps away from the booth for Red Paw. The marsupial’s furrowed her brow, subtly. “I’m sure it’d be easier to sign up here than at the DMV,” Judy offered, a bit more tentatively. “Although I’m pretty sure Nick only donates because of the blueberry muffins they give him afterward.”

“I can’t.” Hadley rolled her eyes with an air of begrudging acceptance. “I moved here from Oztailia over fifteen years ago, but I’m still prohibited from donating because of KRV,” she explained, referring to the koala retrovirus that remained endemic on the island. She waved away Nick and Judy’s sudden looks of deep concern. “I don’t have it, you guys. But it’s enough to have lived there. It’s just a stupid, archaic rule.”

Nick looked over at the jackrabbit behind the booth, having had enough practice by now to recognize the asymmetrical tilt of an eavesdropping rabbit ear. “Did you catch all that?” he inquired smoothly in her direction, as the poor sod flushed red with embarrassment, from ears to nose.

“Um, well…” she stammered, as Judy tugged sharply at the base of Nick’s tail. “That’s still true, for blood,” the jackrabbit admitted, her honey badger partner confused by the conversation suddenly starting midstream. “But you can still sign up to be a bone marrow and stem cell donor!”

Hadley’s bowtie seemed ready to spin like a windmill, as her face lit up with years of pent-up enthusiasm. “Wait, seriously?!” The koala took a handful of purposeful strides in their direction and cast her eyes up and down the table in search of a pen. “Where do I sign?!” The rabbit breathed a sigh of relief as the badger went to fetch a fresh cheek swab, while Nick and Judy directly excused themselves.

On their way towards the history placards lining one wall, they passed a tiny school group of tinier otter, beaver and polar bear cubs, all decked out in the navy blue uniform of the local maritime sciences charter school. The doting schoolmarmot looked down at her adorable little charges.

“Now, where did the Whingz Siblings fly their first plane?” she asked, her voice sweet as syrup.

“KITTY HAUNCH!” the obnoxiously precious rascals replied in unison.

Judy and Nick stepped up to the prominent panel and took a moment to scrutinize the aged, sepia photo of the Whingz, both posing proudly in front of their ramshackle contraption slapped together from balsa wood and bailing wire. The elder sibling, Bruce, wrapped his webbed wing with obvious affection around his sister, Barbara. Even standing as tall as she could on her crutches - her hind legs atrophied from rodent polio - the bat’s wing membrane almost entirely enveloped Barbara’s stout, vole body.

“Barbara Whingz developed a taste for flying early on, as her brother carried her to school every morning,” Judy read out loud from the caption. “But she only began to earn the nickname ‘Freetail’ as she demanded that Bruce ride the rising air currents, hundreds and then thousands of feet into the air. She began working on her first airplane designs as soon as Bruce told her that he hoped to move to Zootopia to attend medical school.” The two appeared again in another photograph, taken from the ground as they flew, side-by-side, a hundred feet in the air.

“I can see you doing that,” Judy remarked off-handedly, one side of her lips curling upwards appreciatively at her fox.

“You’re joking,” Nick responded incredulously. He liked to say that he didn’t fear heights. He just hated them, and gravity, for being such consistent downers.

“Not at all! I can see you screaming, and then peeing yourself.” Judy smirked. “But only a little.”

Nick pursed his lips lightly, and nodded once, confidently. “I have no counterargument,” he conceded.

Nick looked a few placards over and caught a glimpse of a severely handsome canine muzzle, flanked by stock photos of first-generation rockets. He knew for a fact that this museum-approved history of rocket engineer Jack L. Pawson wouldn’t say a single word about Pawson’s secret life: moonlighting as a devout occultist in the Church of Peltema, hobnobbing with the likes of church-founder Aleister Clawly and sci-fi author Roberta Hindline. Near the end of the placard, he saw that they did admit that Pawson died in a mysterious explosion; Nick recalled that one of the more colorful theories had it that Pawson had been trying - and failing, apparently - to summon Cerebus, the gatekeeper of the underworld.

And people still asked Nick why he read so much about history. Because it was amazing, obviously.

“Attention!” The circulating crowds slowed just a tad in response. “In light of our delayed winch demo, Dr. Bianca Faargaden from Remote Mammal Medical will be leading a tour of the ambulance quadcopter in Hangar 2. Again, in light of….” Nick and Judy looked at each other and shrugged gamely, turning on their heels. Over at the Red Paw booth, Nick spotted Hadley feverishly working to complete her paperwork.

A small crowd had gathered around the cozy flying machine, a few feet in diameter at the most, with a cubic-foot aluminum box affixed squarely in the center of gravity. A dignified pouched rat stood at the base of the stairs leading into it, next to a helpful sign that read, “You Must Be This Short to Ride,” at which a modest line of shrews and dormouse had begun to gather. Dr. Faargarden fiddled with both her mic, and the GoatPro atop her head; the A/V techs wheeled over the wireless digital projector so that more ample-sized mammals might be able to follow along.

“Hello! So as you might imagine, the MammalNet has done wonders for response time while limiting the strain on our resources,” Faargarden narrated easily as a mouse mother with a cranky pup followed her up the stairs. “With quadcopter docks scattered every five miles, we can receive medical supplies and deliver trained, lightweight personnel to patients that require basic assessment, treatment, or even transport…” Judy looked over and watched as Hadley grew wide-eyed at the livestreamed sight of doll-sized cots and needles, amidst lint-sized rolls of gauze and oxygen tanks barely the size of their iPaws’ earbuds.

Several minutes later, the crowd actually become so invested in the Q&A that hardly any of them noticed the faint murmur of commotion at the far corner of the hangar entrance. Peering over, Nick could only barely make out a white, furry visage somewhere amidst the halo of smartphones that had begun to materialize out of the crowd. He and Judy shared an interested glance at one another only a split-second before Hadley squeaked, sharply, as if her heart had begun to purr. The koala’s extremities looked like they had begun to almost vibrate with excitement.

“That’s….!” Her feet shuffled as if electrified, even as her face glowed with something that resembled ecstatic stage fright. “THAT’S LIEUTENANT LAIKA FREEFIELD, YOU GUYS.” She grabbed Nick and Judy’s wrists with each paw, shaking them both with glee. “She did an acoustic cover of _Ground Control to Major Tomcat_!” she gushed, without reservation. “IN. SPACE.” Nick and Judy could only watch as the koala made a beeline for the arctic fox, her moon-shaped ears as perky as if cut from fine glass.

Nick stole a glance at Judy before returning his gaze back to Lieutenant Freefield, bedecked in what Nick could only assume was her Casual Friday flight suit. “Maybe the kids are alright,” Nick mused, as he witnessed a youthful marsupial almost burst with respect and admiration for - of all things - a _fox_. A very special fox, to be sure: a famous astronaut, who was also the great-granddaughter of a timber wolf who’d delivered life-saving _toxocara_ serum to Nose Village (Nick had even read his biography in primary school - _White Fang: Hearing the Call of the Sick_ ).

But, still. A fox as some mammal’s hero? He could accept that.

“I hate to interrupt your moment, sap.” Judy poked one ear firmly into Nick’s chin as she pointed to the clock on her phone with one paw. “But we’ve both got places to be.”


	2. Chapter 2

The glass doors slid open automatically, as the evening tide of students and amateur alcoholics vacated the practical, unadorned halls of Zootopia Tech. Swimming slowly upstream, a student ID bounced in its lanyard against the belly of a worn pleather jacket, zipped up tight against the minimal chill. Its owner politely approached the underworked javelina at the reception desk to ask a subdued question, and almost turned down the indicated hallway before being called back to officially record their name onto the chronically-neglected sign-in sheet.

The desert pig waited until the guest was out of sight again before spinning the sheet around to face him, out of mostly innocent but marginally nonplussed curiosity. The hasty scribble read, unhelpfully, “Y. Sphenodon.”

The elevator doors pinged open on the fourth floor, and its sole passenger took a left in the direction labeled “X-Ray Imagery.” Wayfaring their way through a series of nonsensical turns - the building designer having obviously fought a losing war with efficiency - the accidental minotaur finally found themselves in front of a partially open door, revealing a glimpse of heavy consoles blinking in a dimly lit room. A thick claw rapped gently on the door, on which a pawwritten sign announced apologetically, “RESERVED FOR: 3-D Modeling.”

The door swung open the rest of the way. “Yoshi,” Nick crooned from inside the lab. “I should have expected you’d be good at mazes.”

“Still easier to navigate than the ZTA,” the tuatara harrumphed. He stepped inside and glanced over at the jungle cat sitting comfortably at the console, which sat on the other side of the thick glass from what looked like a space-age, cylindrical coffin that took up the rest of the room.

“This is Anna, our tech,” Nick said of the fresh-faced ocelot, who waved politely. “Have you ever had a CAT scan before?”

The reptile smiled, prompting even the feline to instinctually admire his multiple rows of pointed, interlocking teeth. “I went through worse to get my visa,” he joked. “Chest x-rays. Dental scouring…”

“Seriously?” Nick scoffed, as he double-checked that he had all of Yoshi’s paperwork, before handing it over for to receive his John Ramcock.

“I got a doctor’s waiver for the six months of antitoxin cream.” Yoshi looked over the flummoxed faces of the two natural-born Zootopian citizens and shrugged, simultaneously checking “No” to the standard questions about previous welding experience and/or scale piercings. “Immigration doesn’t really care about the difference between a komodo and a red-spotted newt. We all jump through the same hoops.”

Anna shook her head in sympathetic dismay as Yoshi handed back his papers. “That sucks!” she groaned. “And my husband complains about getting our cub all her shots.”

“Still better than Outback Island a few decades ago,” Yoshi continued as he emptied his keys, phone and other metallic objects into a safe box. “You had to pass a trait exam of the border guard’s choosing. For example,” he said, turning to Nick with sudden authority. “Let me see your pouch.”

Nick balked. “…I don’t…”

“Failed.”

“OK, that’s harsh.”

Nick and Yoshi walked into the room with the CAT scanner, its gurney already extended. Yoshi noticed that someone - Nick, no doubt - had thoughtfully blanketed the cot with a layer of memory foam, so that Yoshi didn’t have to rest uncomfortably on his folded back spines. “I can’t say this won’t be as intrusive,” Nick granted. “But at least it’s only intrusive on a molecular level. Wait.” The fox squinted theatrically. “Is that worse?”

“Just so long as I get to keep it when I’m done,” Yoshi agreed charitably, tapping his temple with one claw as he lay prone on the foam; mammals had a checkered past of “studying” reptile bodies without their consent, but Yoshi didn’t feel like rehashing that rough zoological history at the moment. Nick smirked and waved a paw at Anna as he left the room and closed the door. Yoshi heard a faint whirring as the the gurney slid into the body of the scanner. As Yoshi’s head came to a stop at one head, Nick’s tinny voice rang out from somewhere a few inches above the tip of his upper jaw.

“…hear me OK?” Nick asked. “Just try your best not to move. But, fair warning: this beast can get a bit loud.”

“Fine by me,” Yoshi assured him. “My hearing’s a bit crap, anyway.” Nick appreciated the intel, considering that he’d spent the past five minutes quietly trying to puzzle out where Yoshi kept his ears. He knew that not all reptiles even had them, but he didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. Nick once referred to a quagga as a zebra within still within earshot; it had not ended well.

“Thanks again for doing this, by the way,” Nick amended, his paw hovering over the start button. “I could only write so many papers about bunnies,” he chuckled. “I got an A last semester, but my advisor told me it wouldn’t be a proper Forensic Zoology degree if I didn’t diversify.”

“Not the first time I’ve helped someone’s quota,” Yoshi snarked. Nick parted his lips slightly, pondering a defensive retort. He thought better of it, closed his mouth, and smushed the big red button with conviction.

The deep, baritone whirring of the scanner filled the room and reverberated mildly through the glass into the control room. Anna casually surveyed the monitors, trying to downplay her own excitement at seeing the skull of an animal she’d hardly realized existed until yesterday.

“Aren’t you already a cop?” she asked tangentially as the x-ray microtomography slowly assembled an image of a willing tuatara skull. Nick’s final project for the semester was to develop a 3D model of another species’ anatomy; it’d been a happy accident that he’d seen Yoshi’s flyer about needing an apartment around the same time that Ursula and her wife were looking to rent out their couch cavern. When Nick first called him last month, Yoshi seemed like he’d be willing to cut off his own tail to get out of that Zootopian transplant hovel, the Grand Pangolin Arms. “Are patrols really so boring that you want to become a CSI, too?” Anna snipped. She had a hard enough time cleaning up her cub’s nighttime crime scenes.

“The zoology is for me,” Nick admitted with practiced ease, as Yoshi’s bony architecture began to take shape. “The forensics just qualifies it as company time.” Not that it wasn’t professionally relevant, he’d freely admit, but still - Nick would never be one to pass up on a good hustle.

The next fifteen minutes passed quietly, save for minor murmurs of amazement as Yoshi’s head gave up its internal secrets. Even the dentition was amazing. It wasn’t just that the two upper rows of teeth interlocked with the singular bottom row - it was that they weren’t teeth at all, but literal extensions of Yoshi’s jaw bone. That dental scouring for immigration had probably accelerated Yoshi’s future date with dentures by two months.

When all was said and done, Nick returned to the room and helped Yoshi out of the tube. “Do you want to see it?” Nick enquired amicably.

“Wouldn’t be a proper nerd if I didn’t,” the reptile replied.

A fox cop, an ocelot tech, and a tuatara PhD student hunched over the screen as Anna rotated Yoshi’s skull in all three dimensions. Nick grinned and patted Yoshi on the back, subtly avoiding his spines. “It came out great,” he said appreciatively, before narrowing his eyes as Yoshi’s skullcap came into view. “Although I’m not quite sure what happened there,” he said, pointing concernedly at a seeming smudge at the top-center of the lizard’s brainbox.

“You mean my third eye?” Yoshi replied, as naturally as if Nick had two tails and the genitals of a warthog. “It’s mostly vestigial. Scales over while we’re still kids.” He took begrudging pride at the stunned expressions in Nick and Anna’s eyes. “Still helps set my internal clock, though. Never had jet lag in my life.” He paused for a moment to consider an objection. “So long as I don’t wear a hat, at least.”

“…Don’t take this the wrong way,” Nick said, shaking his head in ginger earnest. “But your body is a wonderland.”

“Dial it back a bit, Nick.”  
—  
Nick walked out the front doors of ZTech about an hour after sundown, which gave him just enough time to swing by Judy’s place on the way to Ursula’s regular potluck. For Yoshi, the prospect of renting a room from a smart aleck wombat had been made all the more attractive when he’d learned that he wouldn’t have to subsist entirely on the student meal plan and wilted mealworms from the discount bug bin at Dik-dik’s Deli.

Nick had almost pointed himself in the direction of the Herd Street ZTA, when he spotted the telltale outline of two sandy, oversized ears peeking conspicuously above the lip of a large concrete planter. Entertaining his friend’s need for spy-like discretion, Nick saddled up on the other side of the azalea bush, pulled out his phone, put it to his ear, and spoke out loud as if to a friend that wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with him.

“You’ve come to visit your old man?” Nick swooned. “I’m touched.”

“Look at you, college boy,” Finnick barked softly from the other side of the flowery divide. “You get more square every day.”

“Mind your manners, child,” Nick teased, in that transparently saccharine tone. “Or I’ll send you to bed without your supper.”

“Mind yours,” Finnick dismissed flatly. “Or even you won’t be able to hustle up a new prick.”

“Point taken.”

“Not _yet_ ,” the fennec growled ominously.

Nick let the pregnant pause stretch out for a respectful distance. He stole a glance at his phone and made a quick calculation of just how much more time he could afford to literally beat around the bush. If only Finnick would accept his potluck invitations like a respectable, boring mammal.

“So what, no fruit basket?” Nick finally ventured. “Or is this just the best spot for selling final exam cheatsheets to the rich kids?”

Finnick sighed, and tilted his head half to one side. “Listen,” he said. “And you didn’t hear this from me…”


	3. Chapter 3

Judy reclined serenely in the middle of the gondola, as constellations of soft emerald green blinked in and out high above her head. They constellations rearranged themselves every time she passed, but she liked to try and spot new and novel patterns each time. She’d been particularly proud a few weeks ago, when she’d traced out a fox who’d gotten his tail stuck in a beehive.

She usually only volunteered to lead tours of the glowworm caves once a month - but the usual tour guide had called in with a diurnal hangover, and Nick had work to do at school anyway. The second-to-last tour had been for a cacomistle family whose twin daughters had refused to take off their designer shades, and whose father had insisted on quizzing Judy with rabbit jokes that she’d all heard during Gideon Grey’s halcyon jerk period: “It was a _bad hare day!_ ” Judy had grinned her appreciation through dead eyes.

But no one had even shown up for her last tour, so Judy had happily opted to shove off through the winding caves, paddling only every few minutes, as drops of condensation echoed in the darkness around her. She’d even managed to eyeball a couple species of liverwort, a kind of moss-like plant family which she’d never seen on the farm and for which her flashcards mostly gathered dust in the closet. Nick still liked to tease that she now had a responsibility to taste test them. “For science,” he insisted.

Far too soon, however, her private rowboat thudded gently against the fenders of the well-maintained pier. Judy disembarked, waving her hurried greetings to the bright-eyed slow loris on the next shift. For as much as other mammals raved about late nights in Sahara Square, Judy had begun to appreciate just how productive nocturnal animals could be in a neighborhood where the sun never set.

Throwing her midweek flannel over her moisture-wicking work shirt, Judy jogged through the doors of the waiting cable car, fitting herself just under the elbow of a tundra tiger in a tracksuit, and in front of a seated sugar glider reading the most recent edition of _Vine_ magazine. The cover featured the distant, contemplative portrait of Vine’s Mammal of the Year: Elon Muskox, CEO of SpaceM. “Astronauts by the Ton,” read the byline. “A Payload Whose Time Has Come.”

Ursula lived just up the footpath from the station at Upper Jumar, and Judy could smell the wombat’s home cooking as its aroma simmered through the well-ventilated canyon passage. The cave lights shone a dusky, gentle red, shedding just enough light to see but in a spectrum that didn’t diminish visitors’ night vision. Judy waved at Cory, Ursula’s heart-nosed bat neighbor, as he happily busied himself with a DIY extension of his roost. Living next to a professional tunnel surveyor did wonders for obtaining permits, apparently.

“Come on in, Judy!” Ursula yelped as Judy stepped up to the open door. A finicky molerat struggled desperately to escape the wombat’s grip as she cradled her with one well-muscled arm. “Yoshi’s just got back. Nick’s taking a wee.”

“You’re a master of subterfuge, Ursula,” Nick said as he rounded the corner. He reached over and kissed Judy on the forehead between her ears. “How were the glowbugs?”

“Good,” Judy said, stealing a kiss on Nick’s hip. “Did you bring my pie?” Nick nodded in affirmation. “And what did _you_ bring?”

“Pie,” Nick announced proudly. “Also pie.” Judy narrowed her eyes with well-practiced dismay.

“I totally support this, Nick.”

“Thank you, Ursula.” The fox strutted off smugly towards the dining room, where a pastry duet occupied one whole corner atop the star-shaped limestone table. Judy bit her bottom lip in suppressed surrender as she felt a sudden gust of air rush through the house from the back entrance.

“Yoshi!” Nick hailed. “The gang’s all here.”

“Grading papers,” Yoshi lamented. “Can we trade jobs for a day, Nick?”

“Never,” Nick swore. “Yoshi, meet Judy, my better half.” Judy beamed as she took Yoshi’s scaled claw in her hand.

“It’s great to finally meet you,” she said. “Another Grand Pangolin refugee.”

“So you’ve met Bucky and Pronk,” Yoshi said, arching one ridged eyebrow knowingly.

“…Third?” Nick continued, running the math. He held one paw flat against Judy’s head, her paw still grasping Yoshi’s, as her face shifted steadily from naturally chipper to irrepressibly vengeful. Nick brought his paw level with his belt, where Judy’s head would rest. “Quarter,” he deduced finally. “Better quarter.”

“Hate you.”

“Lies.”

“I see what you mean,” Yoshi said astutely to Ursula.

“Sit, sit!” Ursula said as she handily defused the Banter of Love. Ursula strapped the little one into her high chair as the motley party did as instructed. She’d also invited her taciturn beaver of a work partner, Lou, but he had instantly declined for the same reason he always did: because he vastly preferred his own company, alone in his den, perhaps while carving a tiny bas-relief onto a scale model of the Herbert Hooves Dam. “We’ve got blueberry pie, pitahaya pie, snow tussock knishes, weta wraps with spider paste, hay crisps, mango honey wine, and a heaping bowl of worm hummus that Emilie made before work,” the wombat detailed. She waved off the noncommittal poker face of half the table. “Trust me, I’m not offended if mole food isn’t your thing. But she sends her regards.” Ursula paused expectantly.

“Well?” she demanded. “Dig in, for geode’s sake!”

Judy grabbed a knish, Yoshi a crisp with a spoon of hummus, and Nick a weta wrap. He appraised it carefully: it looked like a gigantic cricket, but with antennas so long that they’d been wrapped tightly around its body like seaweed on a sushi roll. He took an exploratory dab into the side dish of spider paste.

“So how’s the homebody life, Ursula?” Judy enquired, genuinely. “Now that it’s your turn, I mean. I can’t believe both of your unions had such great maternity leave.”

“Oh, Emilie’s union sucks.” Ursula attempted valiantly to play Here Comes the Coal Miner with Octavia’s unwilling mouth, which immediately became flecked with rejected worm bits. “But jobs in the ND tend to have a pretty great hibernation allowance. She’s using that.”

“I’m actually not sure if I ever learned what Emilie does,” Yoshi admitted, reaching for a third crisp.

“She’s a medical biomimicrist at Moonborn Memorial.”

“Judy understood only half of that sentence,” Nick jabbed, as Judy drove a studied judo kick into his shin. “Guess which half!” Nick managed to grunt before the second kick landed somewhere softer.

“For example, she’s trying to develop a flexible clot retriever for stroke patients,” Ursula offered. “So right now, she’s studying this really sweet group of flower bats. Apparently, they can shapeshift their tongues while lapping up nectar.”

“ _Nick only understood half of that sentence!_ ” Judy spit, desperately grabbing hold of the opening with both paws.

“There’s two of them,” Yoshi muttered in disbelief, and semi-genuine desperation.

“So what about you, Yoshi?” Judy diverted the conversation to neutral ground, as she quickly realized that Nick’s face was swelling more with pride than with the sweet tears of defeat. “Nick said you were from Newtfoundland?”

“We moved to the capital city, Scaletongue, when I was young,” Yoshi explained patiently as he sprung for one of his own wetas. “Which itself is a fraction of the size of one district here. But my family’s originally from Nuwyvern.”

“That reminds me of our friend Hadley,” Judy commented welcomingly, as Nick jumped the queue and began to break off a piece of pie crust. “Why did you move?”

“Lost our land.” Judy’s face wobbled and fell noticeably. “After a mining conflict with the…sheep,” Yoshi clarified. He’d just stopped himself from calling them “Woolies,” which he thought might meet with a mixed reception in present company.

“Oh,” Judy mustered. “That’s terrible.” She blinked for a moment in awkward disarray before reaching for a handful of hay crisps.

“Tell her what you’re researching now,” Nick diverted, knowingly.

“No one cares about what PhD students do all day,” the tuatara hedged.

“C’mon, Yoshi!” Ursula bundled up a napkin of worm residue and pitched it over the kitchen counter and into the bin. “Nerd potluck!”

Yoshi mustered a smile, flashing those astonishing chompers that Nick still couldn’t get over, and which Judy was witnessing for the first time with a passably straight face. “Asteroid mining,” the reptile confessed, as Nick surveyed Ursula’s gobsmacked face lighting up like a firefly lantern. “My thesis is titled, ‘Heavy Metal Mine Tailing Recovery in Microgravity Environments,’” Yoshi confessed shyly.

“ _DOPE_ ,” Ursula shouted, her paw suspended halfway to her child’s mouth.

“My advisor is still back home,” Yoshi continued, encouraged. “Neil deGrasse Newton?”

“ _DOOOOOOOOOOPE_.”

“Pie?” Nick held out a pawful of blueberry dessert in the center of the table, smiling obliquely at Judy. The rabbit wiggled her nose in appreciation, and diverted Nick’s paw directly towards her mouth as the wombat and the lizard-kin began to wax poetic about ore access and ventilation shafts. Nick lovingly wiped some errant pie bits from Judy’s lip as baby Octavia began to wonder if she’d ever get fed again.

“Sly fox,” Judy sniffed.

“Funny you mention that,” Nick said, his voice dropping a handful of decibels as he reached for a weta and piled on the paste. “Finnick stopped by school today.”

“Really?” Judy felt the tone of the conversation shifting, and maintained a steady, serene front with the help of more hay crisps. “How is he doing?”

“Not bad. He’s a surprisingly good bouncer, at least at the rabbit bars. Are you sure you…” Nick glanced across the table at the mining geeks, now gleefully occupied in professional minutia. “…Always used the garden phone?” he asked, quietly.

Judy flashed back to the cheap burner phone that Nick kept squirreled away at the bottom of his window’s flower box, where he grew mint for his tea. He’d insisted on getting one for any time they had to contact the Bigs, from the moment they asked for help with Weasleton. Judy nodded confidently, her face a mask of innocence. “You know I did,” she said, smiling for public consumption.

Nick leaned back, smiling in genuine relief. He reached for the jar of mango honey booze and poured Judy a glass, as Octavia mewed in the direction of the worm hummus and temporarily dragged her mother out of her geeky reverie. “I know you did, too, fluff.” He exhaled, the tips of his fur seemingly unclenching. Judy raised her eyebrows at Nick, over the lip of her glass, as she took a hefty sip.

Nick took Judy’s paw in his hand and kissed it gently with his snout. “Once we’re home,” he said. “I’ll explain what a ‘foxfire sale’ is.”


	4. Chapter 4

Judy hadn’t been happy about the term. Nick, in contrast, seemed pretty much resigned to his species’ place in the black market lexicon.

For whatever reason, “foxing” had become the widely-understood phrase for the act that every digitally-savvy mammal feared: having their personal information - name, address, phone number, every last scrap of their private contact details - released into the internet wilds. By simple deductive reasoning, a “foxfire sale” served a singular purpose: to sell these personal details for as much money as possible.

Judy and Nick sat together at roll call like usual, stonefacedly pensive with knowledge currently only possessed by two foxes, a rabbit, and a cape buffalo. Contrary to the chief’s urging, Nick didn’t dare offer Finnick the official title of “informant.” As he explained it, Finnick only kept Nick in the shady loop out of “pure begrudging self-interest.” That, and the occasional high-end guitar amp.

The rest of the ZPD crew were filling the bullpen with the usual bustle, of arm-wrestling and incredibly wonky dissection of fantasy hornball leagues, when Bogo walked in. The noise hardly abated, assisted as it was by Judy’s now-fond habit of pounding the table and hoo-aaing right along with the rest of the bears and timber wolves. Nick’s offers to buy her a megaphone had gone underappreciated.

“Shut it!” Bogo’s crisp command brought the rabble to a practiced halt. The chief surveyed the room with a glum expression, laying out the relevant technical details in his head. “First things first,” he announced, gripping the lectern tightly, the day’s case files untouched.

“We have it on good authority,” Bogo began, as Nick took a fleeting moment to wallow in the chief’s pointedly indirect praise, “that customer data for Flap Mobile had been compromised.” A few officers shifted in their seat - Delgato, Trunkaby, Grizzoli, the friendly new hyena whose name seemed too rude to actually say out loud (Pupslasher? Really?) But the tone of the room remained subdued, albeit undercut with a suspicious sense that this seemed too routine, too civilian a matter with which to start a typically hard-nosed police briefing.

“Text messages, call records, internet histories…” Bogo continued, as everybody but Pupslasher got markedly more concerned. “And billing information. Anyone who thinks they may have been affected, talk to Mammal Resources. They’ll help you take all the usual precautions against fraud and identity theft.” In the far corner of the room, Nick spied Fangmeyer absentmindedly picking at a knot in his chest fur.

Bogo sighed, and leaned his weight onto the podium. “We also, however, have reason to believe…” Ears perked up around the room as they waited for the other hoof to drop. “…that this data has been picked through - specifically - for that of ZPD officers.” A short, strangled toot involuntarily escaped Trunkaby’s deflated snout. “And that it’s soon being auctioned,” the chief revealed. “As a lot.”

The temperature in the room spiked noticeably, as blood rushed to the faces and ears of two dozen burly mammals - all of whom liked to pride themselves on taking down robbers and pushers, but who knew next to nothing about how to do it from behind a computer screen.

“Which means that any high-rolling scumbag now has an opportunity to obtain the names, addresses, and private information of many of the mammals in this room,” Bogo emphasized. “On the bright side, we have the name of the compromised provider, and reportedly a week of lead time before the auction takes place.” The hackles on the backs of every mammal’s neck eased a little, but not enough to qualify as relaxed. “So while our digital forensics team partners with Flap, some of you will head up the investigation the old-fashioned way.”

Bogo tilted his horns to the fox and rabbit sharing a chair at the front of room. “Hopps and Wilde,” Bogo huffed. “You’re up.”

“Good thinking, sir!” Nick enthused in a double-pawed attempt at both ego and morale boosting. “Sending your A-Team!”

“That’s correct, Wilde.” Bogo took a moment to soak in Nick’s look of sheer unabashed elation, before crushing it utterly. “If by ‘A-Team,’ you mean ‘As-small-as-possible.’” Bogo’s putdown accomplished what Nick’s preening had not, as the assembled officers exhaled in order to emit a cloud of chuckles that hovered a few feet above Nick and Judy’s heads. “Those caves can get cramped,” Bogo explained helpfully.

“You’re sure getting the hang of this snark thing, sir!” Out of Bogo’s sight, Judy secretly dug an adorable claw into the meat of Nick’s leg, hoping against hope that neither of them were digging a hole out of which they couldn’t crawl out.

Bogo returned his thin, horn rim glasses to the bridge of his enormous nose as he looked back down to the case files in front of him. “Now,” he continued. “We had another prairie dog brawl at Amber & Ivy…”  
—  
The roof of the cave foyer soared above Nick and Judy’s head as they took the long, echoing walk towards the reception desk. Just behind the receptionist and stretching to the ceiling, the Flap corporate logo blazed in a patterned array of what must have been thousands of LEDs: the profiled silhouette of an open bat’s mouth at bottom, screaming the universal icon for wifi into the space above its head.

The foyer thronged with winged mammals, of seemingly every different possible configuration: gigantic ears and tiny ones, fine silken coats and coarse hair that wouldn’t look out of place on a sheep. A cacophony of chirps flowed steadily from the commuting shaft to one side of the cavern, as a stream of morning shift workers performed barrel rolls past the ID scanner set high into the sheer cave wall.

Glancing further up, Judy suddenly realized that there were just as many bats in fine suits and ties hanging, casually, from the ceiling as there were toeing gently around them on the cavern floor. She watched with something approaching envy as even the most well-dressed bats greeted their work colleagues with open wings, drawing them close and warmly pressing their nose into their friends’ wing membranes.

“They’re so _social_ ,” Judy marveled.

“I never thought I’d find another species that gives bunnies a run for their money,” Nick confessed. And compared to bunnies, the fox thought, bats could only pump out one pup a year. To get a population that could rival Bunnyburrow, that implied that these caves required millions of Bat-Bonnies and Stu’s. Even the jerkiest rabbit at least had biology on their side; bats had to _actually like each other_.

Judy and Nick sauntered up to the desk, as the receptionist finally began to come into focus in the dim light. With a mild start, Judy and Nick both realized that they’d assumed the sleek, blueish-grey sheen behind the counter was just another species of particularly lithe bat. The silver fox looked up with a quiet look of unsurprised welcome.

“Officers,” the vixen smiled sweetly. “The day shift manager has been expecting you,” she said, reaching for the phone. “Thank you so much for coming out so quickly,” she purred while dialing the manager’s extension. “Everyone here has been absolutely pulling their hair out.”

“Well, we can’t have that,” Nick commiserated, leaning one shoulder onto the desk. “I’d hate to see you muss up such a lovely coat.”

Judy stole glances between the two sly dogs, trying to tamper down the delighted glimmer in her eyes. “Mr. Grisou?” the lady-fox enquired into the phone, as Nick received a loving pinch behind his kneecap. “ZPD has arrived, sir.” The vixen returned the phone to its cradle and leaned over to make eye contact with both Judy and Nick in turn. “He’ll be down in a moment,” she assured them.

“Thank you so much! And, if you won’t say it,” Judy continued, with an upward smirk at Nick’s serene snout, “I will. I don’t think either of us expected to meet another fox in this neck of the woods,” Judy said, with as much eager pleasantry as she could muster.

The vixen shrugged, the sheer black fabric of her simple blouse rustling slightly in the cave breeze. “I can’t say I did, either,” she agreed. She tilted her head casually in Nick’s direction before looking down at Judy, standing at Nick’s side. “Especially not any that I’ve seen before in the paper.”

“Always room for one more on the force,” Nick smiled easily, waving one paw up and down the length of his uniform. It was like watching a flirtatious ballet, Judy realized.

The vixen blushed quietly beneath her metallic fur. “Not in the cards for me, I don’t think,” she deflected charitably. “I’m much more comfortable in my apartment with a cup of tea and a World of Furcraft raid,” she confessed, as Judy herself nearly swooned from adorableness. “Could never sleep through the night as a kit. The other bats online were always so welcoming. I guess I never left the roost,” she giggled.

“It doesn’t ever get damp in these caves by yourself?” Nick enquired. Like a boss, Judy decided.

“I definitely need a new space heater,” she yipped, laughing. “I swear I can feel a moss colony setting up shop in my lungs. But nothing an occasional trip to the spa can’t cure.” Her eyes narrowed slightly across the counter. “Have you ever been to the Mystic Oasis?”

“Officers!” The grey bat waddled over to them, his wings held tightly around his body; no hug was forthcoming from this one. “Milo Grisou. I’m sorry we have to meet this way,” he said, extending one nervous claw. “Please follow me.” He turned to the vixen with affection. “Thank you, Eva.”

“Of course.” Eva waved at Nick and Judy, as they both stole smiling backward glances while being ushered towards an open elevator door. The bat swiped his badge in front of an electronic eye and tapped his thumb against the button for the appropriate floor.

“I’m always surprised by how warm these tunnels can be,” Nick said, in an attempt to give the manager bat an out for his harried appearance.

“Waste heat,” the bat explained, not looking especially grateful. “All of the servers and data farms in Zootopia are maintained in the lower caverns, to keep the equipment cool. And bats are just as good at HVAC as they are at tech start-ups.” The elevator pinged as the doors slid open on the -11th Floor. Mr. Grisou strode confidently onto the waiting catwalk to Nick and Judy’s transparent shock. “But we’ve had plenty of other things keeping us up at night.”

A tsunami of customer service chatter filled the massive stone hall. The space was a veritable hanging garden of cubicles, most of them filled with bats in clean button-down shirts hanging head-first towards the center of the earth, headphones firmly affixed to their variable-sized ears. A labyrinth of catwalks criss-crossed the open air to provide access, like an M.C. Etchfur painting come to life.

“No, ma’am,” Judy heard from one side. The mild-mannered long-nose massaged one ear gently, his eyes shut tight as if trying to forcefully meditate. “No, you cannot use an electric eel to charge your phone. Yes, I understand that it’s electric.”

Mr. Grisou led them to the far end of one side of the cave, which Nick realized he couldn’t adequately distinguish between any other side. The cubicles gave way to a larger, partitioned area, in which more than a dozen bats scurried - both upside down and right-side up, whatever that meant here - between a baffling number of consoles, all slathered in an even more baffling amount of alien code.

“ZPD, the team. Team, ZPD,” Milo offered in terse introductions. Only a handful of bats bothered to break eye contact with their screens. “These guys will provide you with any information they have. But if you’ll excuse me, I have a PR fire to put out.” Without a backward glance, the grey bat climbed the modest railing along the catwalk, and fell face-first into the darkness. Both Nick and Judy instinctively stopped breathing, starting again only when they heard a frenzied flapping of wings and Mr. Grisou’s wheezy voice calling out: “Marketing! Meet in Roost 147B in ten minutes!”

Nick and Judy glanced at one another, blinked, and nodded in unison. They turned to the nearest tech - a tiny, orangish-red mammal with matching eyes that bulged like a startled lemur. Thankfully, this one was at least upright. “Officer Hopps, ZPD,” Judy began. “And this is Officer Wilde.”

The bat reached for nearby mug as he redirected his attention to the two wingless visitors. He held the cup in between the tip of both wings. Judy’s eyes weren’t sure if the liquid crimson of the mug’s contents was due to the dim red light, or its actual color. Nick’s nose was plenty sure.

“Hopps. Vilde. Velcome.” The bat fixed Judy and Nick with an appraising, hungry expression. “Vhat might ve assist you vith?”

The white-winged vampire bat hanging by the console behind him spun around, her face depleted of all patience. “Dammit, Mike, you just had sensitivity training. And is that my coffee?” She nicked the mug clean out of his claws - Judy could now see that it read “1) I Need It. 2) I’ll Cut You.” - as the short-nosed fruit bat failed to conceal his enjoyment of his own tired joke. “Fangcur,” she swore, edging away.

Mike shrugged. “Welcome to the madhouse, guys,” he said in his neutral Zootopian accent, smiling glibly.

Judy flipped open her notepad, while Nick looked around for a free chair and came up empty. “What can you tell us?” Nick began. He held up one paw as Mike began to open his mouth. “Explain it like you’re talking to your mother.”

“My mother is a data visualizer at Z-Mobile.”

“My grandmother, then.”

Mike sighed. “They got a lot.” He poked an errant claw at his tablet, scrolling down seemingly endless rows. “Texts. Credit cards. We’re just lucky we don’t keep medical records.”

“Don’t you have firewalls and encryption for this kind of thing?” Judy probed. She was young and hip, she told herself. She knew “the lingo.”

The fruit bat reached for a juice box of mango punch, which seemed to actually belong to him this time. His co-workers’ desks were littered with energy drinks and protein bars; Nick had spied what appeared to be a free-access snack bar on their way over here. One discarded can announced proudly, in electric neon italic font, “ _BITE_.” In smaller font, “Moth-Flavored! Fortified!”

“Whoever did it…” The suddenly bashful fruit bat looked askance, as some of his eavesdropping coworkers pretended to focus entirely on their work. “They didn’t need to to worry about that.”

“Meaning?” Nick asked, arching his eyebrows with a look of unsurprised disapproval.

“They had access,” Mike confessed. “They stole it in person.”


	5. Chapter 5

The street lights outside Nick’s apartment flickered into existence as the mid-evening shaded into night. Nick rested both paws on his chest, his fleece, carrot-print jammies buttoned securely around his furry frame as his feet dangled over one armrest of the couch. His head laying peacefully in her lap, Judy gently scritched the space between his ears with one paw, while holding a thick pile of flash cards in the other.

“In bone collagen,” she read, “Elevated levels of nitrogen-15 can indicate…?”

“A marine diet.”

“Or…?” Judy pressed, tapping Nick’s skull as if were an old farm tractor in need of a jumpstart.

“Or foods from saline soils and arid environments,” Nick replied confidently.

“Listen to that,” Judy sallied towards Hadley, her spare theremin parts littered across Nick’s desk. The koala could just as easily nerd out in her own apartment, but she said that Nick and Judy’s bickering was more entertaining than any podcast. “He almost sounds clever,” Judy encouraged, sardonically.

“Which itself would be quite a clever ruse,” Nick countered. “ _Cleverception_.”

Judy flipped the last card onto the side table as Hadley shook her head and slid her custom casing into place. “Oxygen-18…”

“…In teeth, indicates drinking water from warmer climates. Oxygen-16 for colder.”

“My parents would be so proud of you, Nick.” Hadley’s distant memories of Introduction to Plant Anatomy jarred forcibly with the hard, inorganic materials now beneath her paws. Mycology had been fun, she admitted. And Ethnobotany. And botanical garden field trips while blissed out on nip.

“Think how mine feel,” Judy said, shaking her head in loving derision. “A little bit of plant husbandry and mom will want to marry you herself.”

“Damn,” Nick lamented. “I’d set my sights on Gideon.” Judy flicked his nose and scrutinized the next card. “Because pie,” he reminded her helpfully.

“How long…” Judy paused and squinted, at text that didn’t actually exist. “Is the average fox baculum?”

Hadley snorted over a stray circuit board as Nick took a deep breath, and sighed for dramatic effect.

“Five to seven centimeters,” he recalled woefully.

“Incorrect!” Judy bopped Nick’s nose with the stack of cards. “The correct answer is ‘fun-sized.’”

“That is not a valid statistical measurement,” Nick pointed out.

“You’re just mad that I bought you those calcium supplements.”

“You said I was at risk for osteoarthritis.”

“These hips don’t lie.”

“You two are both adorable,” Hadley remarked, trying to focus. “And making me mildly uncomfortable.”

“Tell her about the vixen!” Judy shouted, pounding Nick’s chest with the pawful of osteology quiz questions. “She was the cutest _ever_ ,” Judy raved to an endlessly amused marsupial. “She’s bunny-approved.”

“Whom I met on an active investigation,” Nick hemmed weakly. “Besides. Three relationships on my plate is enough.” He held up one paw and counted them off: “Bunny. Bones. Bogo.” His shrugging shoulders jabbed Judy in one thigh as she pushed his nose to one side. “I’m full-up!” Nick argued.

“You haven’t even used your caaaaaaard,” Judy pleaded. A late-night brainstorming session had hit upon the near-matching laminated photo that now sat in both of their wallets. They consisted of a selfie of the two of them on one side, and a typed and signed letter on the back. Nick’s read:

_NICK’S PERMISSION SLIP._

_I am Nick’s PREYfriend (Primary Romantic Entanglement Yenta). I hereby attest to the following:_

_1) That we adore each other._  
_2) That both his bedhead and personality are absolutely marvelous._  
_3) That he may bed or date whichever pretty and/or handsome creature he so chooses._

_Kisses,  
Judy_

Judy’s card was pretty much the same, except that Nick was her PREDfriend (Primary Romantic Entanglement Dummy).

Sensing a losing argument, Nick opted to change horses mid-stream. “Hey, Hadley,” Nick called out from his fleece-wrapped repose. “Do you know much about hacking?”

“Software, you mean? Not hardware?” Hadley clarified patiently, one paw reaching for the soldering iron.

“There must be overlap,” Nick suggested, like a moron. If only Judy hadn’t been in the same boat, she’d have been all over it.

Hadley let go of the iron and sighed into the table. “That’s kind of like saying that taxi drivers and urban planners have similar jobs because they’re both part of the city,” Hadley attempted to explain in a voice that didn’t drip with disappointment. “You’re kind of right, I guess? But mostly - _terribly_ \- wrong.”

“You’re a smart mammal,” Judy encouraged, as if Hadley had forgotten. “We’re just a bit fish out of water on this Flap case, is all.”

“Maybe I’ll take a stab at software, one day.” Hadley buffed the theremin’s antennas with one paw. “But this isn’t like _The Mousetrap_ , where you stare at computer code and suddenly develop superpowers.”

“The original or the sequels?” Nick remarked from behind her. “I thought the third one had some good fight choreography.”

“…Please don’t do this to me, Nick.”

“But whoever stole the data, Mike said that they physically added something to the hardware, and siphoned out the data as it came in,” Judy attempted to recount. “And all of their guys have solid alibis.”

“It’s not anything that I could help with any more than they could, anyway.” Hadley spun around in her swivel chair, charmed but also horrified at Judy’s attempt to deputize her. “I’m sure they’ve got their own set-up. It’s not a school project. I wouldn’t know what I was looking at.” She suddenly heard herself, and her ears quivered slightly with embarrassment. “Sorry, guys,” she said, apologetically. “Your eyes are just bigger than my stomach on this one.”

“It’s OK, pouch.” Hadley had never quite figured out how Nick could get away with these nicknames. “You’re right. It’s our job, not yours.”

Nick and Judy returned to their cards, and Hadley to her gear. Nick reached over to the coffee table and grabbed his still-steaming mug of blackberry tea, which he brought carefully to his lips. Judy glowered at Nick in warning. “If you spill that on my crotch,” she advised, “I’ll skin yours.”

“Promises, promises.”

“Sometimes I totally do wish that I’d been born a few years later, though,” Hadley thought out loud. Now that she had gotten going on this subject, she figured it was Nick’s fault if he had to put up with the consequences. “It would have made teaching myself this stuff so much easier.”

“How do you mean?” Judy asked, as she scrutinized the next card, trying to puzzle out how to pronounce _porotic hyperostosis_.

“Like, I used to have to physically buy data sheets - part manuals, basically.” Hadley shook her head at the memory of having collected them like the other children collected Pokémuz cards. “Kids these days,” she groused - that is, Nick figured, maybe a decade younger than her - “they can just save up for augmented reality goggles. They’re still wicked expensive, but seriously.” She craned her neck at the increasingly attentive couple, her eyes growing wide with enthusiasm. “You can just look at even custom hardware, and it’ll tell you exactly what you’re looking at!”

Hadley turned back to her nearly completed project - if was almost time to feed Fiddle, who would otherwise start chirping up a storm next door - as Judy and Nick shared a pregnant glance.

“Hadley,” Judy appealed, gingerly, as Nick expertly downed a swig of tea. Hadley turned back around, the tone in Judy’s voice droning purposefully in her ears.

“Would you happen to know where one could get some of these goggles?”


	6. Chapter 6

“Welcome to Raphael’s SightBite Emporium, Where the Whole World is One Click Away.” The teenage bat didn’t even look up from her tablet, where she appeared to be playing Angry Boars while reciting her required greeting on monotone autopilot. “All echolocation units are currently 15% off.”

Nick and Judy made their way through the warren of precariously stacked electronics and slightly off-brand plasma television screens. Nick carefully stepped around a bin of used muzzles that sat intermingled with back issues of Guts & Arteries Magazine. As far as consumer-friendly industries went, he’d pretty much nailed it with the pawpsicle racket. Much less paranoia in the legally-adjacent sweet tooth business.

“Actually, we’re with the ZPD,” Judy corrected. The young bat looked up, her poker face barely disturbed, and assessed the two mammal officers with studied disinterest.

“DAD!” the press-ganged employee called with irritation, as she wandered off towards the back room. “COPS ARE HERE!”

Judy and Nick looked at each other, and shrugged.

A burly, stern-looking bat, his denim button-up abutting nicely against his forest camo pants, emerged from behind a stack of infrared scopes at the back of the store. He gave an apologetic, gap-toothed smile as he made his way over to take his daughter’s place behind the counter, grabbing a record book on his way and placing it face-up on the counter.

“Hopps and Wilde, ZPD,” Nick introduced again, glancing over the owner’s shoulder at the vanishing teen. “You do not seem surprised to see us.”

“Rafi Oreillesque. And, no,” the big-ear admitted, shrugging defensively. “You get used to it. A scraggle-whiskered weasel once tried to convince me he was an avid spleunker. He pronounced it SPLOON-car.” He flipped open the book to sales from that week, and looked up expectantly. “Who, what, when…?”

“Not sure who,” Judy admitted. “But they would have bought a…” She consulted the koala-inspired note from the night before. “A Mystery Science SongEar 3000.”

The proprietor laughed, his ears curling like ram horns. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Seemed like a nice kid,” he said as he flipped through the pages to a few weeks before. “But you don’t get that many bats coming in here. Mostly cave tourists and diurnal contract workers, plus the usual freak shows.” He pinpointed the name with one claw, and spun the book around for Nick and Judy to see.

“Had to pay for it on layby,” Raphael revealed, shaking his head. “He wasn’t exactly rolling in dough.”  
—  
Mr. Grisou mused in silence, rolling the name over in his frazzled memory. He looked like he hadn’t gotten any sleep yesterday, either. “Can’t say the name rings a bell, but we employ thousands. We’ll have to pay a visit to Payroll.” The gray bat with a few new grey hairs ushered Judy into the waiting elevator. She cast a cheery thumbs up behind her as the doors were closing, right at Nick, as he stood by his assigned post: guarding the reception desk.

Judy returned ten minutes later, having asked security to meet her and Nick at Guano Processing. Their guy was scheduled to get off in half an hour.

“So it’s not real blood?” Judy heard Nick say as she approached.

“Blood substitute,” Eva explained. “Mostly just a protein slurry. It wouldn’t even smell the same without the additives.” She waved excitedly as Judy as she approached. “But less than one percent of bats are ‘vampires,’ anyway” she explained, in obvious dismay. “That’s just a stereotype. Honestly, they’re gentler than a lot of foxes I’ve met.”

“So you’ve never tried it?” Nick probed, gently.

“I…” Eva looked to one side and giggled, as Judy suppressed what would have been a terribly transparent grin. “It’s developed a bit of a following, even outside the ND. As an energy drink.” Nick’s eyebrow peaked, and Eva lowered her voice a notch or two. “It may have helped me power through a MineClaw marathon,” she confessed. “Last week.”

“I support your questionable life choices,” Nick commended admirably. He turned expectantly to Judy. “Good to go?”

“Absolutely,” Judy enthused, her adrenaline already kicking into gear. “It’s great to see you, Eva.”

“Aww. It’s great to see you too, Officers.” She stole a glance at Nick, who had just stopped himself from instinctively putting on his shades in the middle of a cave, like a tool. “But good luck on your case.”

“What’s left of it!” Judy told her, a tone of impending triumph in her voice. “Say your goodbyes and follow me, Nick.” Judy nearly skipped her way towards the service elevator, where Grisou and a few security guards were just beginning to assemble.

“Next week. Grass Menagerie,” Nick murmured softly, spinning smoothly away and trailing after his partner. “I’ll see you then, Ms. Laxpelt.”

The vixen waved as Nick turned his back. “See you then,” Eva said quietly after him, a strange mixture of emotions beginning to churn in her belly.  
—  
The straw-colored fruit bat slumped over to his locker, his dungarees caked with a sludge of mostly-digested mosquito thoraxes and papaya skins. He’d spent hours in the latrine caves playing “Name That Smell,” coming up with different descriptions that could somehow encapsulate the aromas that surrounded him every day; his favorites so far included “wormwood tea steeped in a skunk sac,” and “fermented stonefish left in the boudoir of a raccoon brothel.” Suffice to say he much preferred his shifts in Shipping, when he had them; at least the guano had mostly dried out by then.

“Ash Tuckworth,” came a perky voice behind him. He turned around and clicked, instinctively, from the fright. He could make out a half dozen figures that had surrounded him in a tight semi-circle against the lockers - four of them with wings, but as big as they come. ‘Flying foxes,’ they called them.

“Mr. Tuckworth,” Nick said, playing the good cop. “We don’t have to cuff you. But it might…behoove you,” Nick suggested, “to come with us.”

“And if you’re thinking of spreading wing over the railing…” Judy cautioned smugly, her hind paw resisting the urge to thump, “You should know that these really hurt.” With an air of polite menace, she patted her taser holstered purposefully at her hip. She glanced over the railing towards the ground, which she could see only faintly past the cat’s cradle of catwalks, at least a hundred feet down. Ash’s face fell instead, as two security guards took up positions on either side of him.

“The elevator’s nicer,” Nick said, as he and his accidental fox cousins led the way towards the exit. “Just not as exciting.” He turned to the unoccupied pair of bats and smiled broadly, as Judy fell in step beside him. “Tell me the truth now,” he asked excitedly. “Is flying as amazing as I think it’d be?”


	7. Chapter 7

“I’d like to see my lawyer,” Ash squeaked meekly. “Please.” The interrogation room had its dimmer switch, as mandated by species accommodation regulations, but even these mild florescent lights were on the verge of triggering a colossal headache for a fruit bat already on the verge of a panic attack.

“Your council is coming,” Judy assured him, as Nick reclined easily against the back wall as Judy flexed her fledgling power trip muscles. “But I’m not sure how a lawyer will be able to explain why a janitor would need hardware tutorial goggles that cost two months of his salary.” Judy leaned in, tapping her pen in a steady staccato against the table. “I hear classes at ZTech are much cheaper. It’s a good school. ZU is a waste of money, really.”

“Guano processor,” Ash corrected her, feebly. “Not a janitor.”

“I’ll put it in my report.”

“You know,” Nick wandered over to the side of the table, as Ash fidgeted uncomfortably. “I used to clear out septic tanks when I was your age.” Judy had heard this story before; “Septic Tank Technician” was a rose-tinted description of that particular hustle, but she let Nick have his moment. “It’s dirty work. Crackers, the smell.” Nick turned to Judy as she tried to maintain her game face in light of Nick swearing like a rabbit.

“I count my lucky stars that I’m past that part of my life now,” Nick said, as the panicked bat attempted to steady his breathing, and mostly failed. “The company’s a lot nicer,” he remarked, somehow managing to slip in a romantic aside during a middle of a damn interrogation. “Pay’s a bit better, too.”

“I’d like to see my lawyer,” Ash repeated, as firmly as he could. It came out about as firm as Delgato’s tail after a round of purr therapy.

“She’s coming,” Judy told him again. Nick wandered back to his on-deck position in the corner. Judy loved this game way too much sometimes.

“The trouble, of course,” Judy cautioned, “is that we’re on a bit of a deadline.” She looked up from her report, making hard eye contact with a bat who really, really wanted to find a dark closet to hide in right now. “You see, you’re part of an investigation into a foxfire sale. Do you know what that is?” Nick watched Ash’s wings begin to fidget, his nervous tics traveling down the length of his hands and vibrating through his membranes.

Ash shook his head gently, his mind whirring so fast it was about to pull a muscle. “No, ma’am,” he mustered, pitifully.

“Are you sure? Because, wow.” Judy retreated back to her report, as if Ash’s wellbeing was the least interesting thing in the room. “Digital wiretapping, identity theft. These are real crimes, but a few years in minimum security wouldn’t be out of the question.” She shrugged and looked over to Nick, who nodded solemnly in sympathetic earnest. “But I shouldn’t have to explain to you how much worse a crime gets when it endangers law enforcement. Judges hate that. Sticks right in their craw.” Judy wasn’t entirely sure what a ‘craw’ was, but she’d heard it once on _Pawai’i 5-0_ and thought it sounded tough.

“I don’t…” Ash’s wings began to actively tremble, despite his intentions. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really?” Both Judy and Nick noticed an actual hint of surprise in the bat’s face, but continued to play through. “Because we know there’s a foxfire sale going on. And we know that there’s a lot being auctioned off.” The rabbit leaned back in her chair and tapped her pen thoughtfully against her chin. “A lot made up entirely of cops.”

“I…don’t…” Ash’s junior relaxation efforts were crumbling like a beaver dam built on a foundation of bear scat. “I didn’t do that,” he said.

“I believe you, kid.” Nick walked back and took a seat on the edge the table, by Judy. “We’re not saying that you’re some kind of criminal mastermind.” He took a moment to take stock of Judy’s expression, which probably seemed hard and blank to Ash but screamed silent agreement to Nick. “We’re saying that - just maybe - you did something stupid. Something that, down the line, came with a lot of consequences.” Nick turned to Ash, breathing deeply on his own, hoping that the kid might follow his example instead of passing out mid-interrogation. “And now those consequences are coming home to roost.”

“I don’t have anything against cops,” the bat blurted, his nervous energy about to rend his stomach in half. “I swear. I swear to you.”

“I wouldn’t blame you even if you did,” Nick counseled. “But there are plenty in this city who do.”

“And if you’re found guilty,” Judy interjected. “You’ll get to meet plenty of them. The rec yard is a very social place.”

The fruit bat seemed to deflate, his wings curling inward like a moth trapped under a heat lamp. This is not what he’d signed up for, he thought.

“…OK.” Ash hung his head down and looked like he was about to cry. Nick drew a pen from his back pocket - a plain Ibix, because wiretapping this poor kid right now would have been as illegal as it would have been hypocritical - and handed it to Judy, who drew forth a blank piece of paper from her folder. She slid them both over in front of Ash, who regarded them not unlike he’d regarded his self-worth the first time he’d fallen face first into the guano pits.

“Write down everything here.” Judy said, her stern facade beginning to crack in genuine sympathy. “If we have any chance of stopping the sale before it happens, we’ll need names,” Judy directed him, with gentle urgency. “Including any accomplices at Flap.”

“It was just me,” Ash said, reaching for the pen. “Just stupid, dumb me.”

Judy looked up at Nick, relieved, as he watched the young fool bend over the table and scratch out his last ticket for a second chance. She also wondered how she was going to tell Nick later that he’d done obnoxiously well, but without entirely admitting that it also made her want to jump his bones a little.

Nick’s expression, on the other hand, didn’t seem nearly so content. He furrowed his brow slightly as small beads of sweat rolled down Ash’s face, prompting the bat to wipe it away with a still-shaking wing.

Nick stood up, suddenly. He walked around to Ash’s backside, as the startled bat froze in place at what this portended. Nick lowered his head.

_SSSSSNNNNNNIIIIIIFFFFFFFFFF_

It was Judy’s turn to stare wide-eyed in front of her, as Nick walked calmly towards the door, having just taken a hulking sniff of guilty bat sweat.

“THAT.” Ash spoke first, and with more force than he’d mustered all night, pointing with a shaking claw at the offending fox. “THAT WAS…” He stopped, and looked at Judy with a novel kind of perplexed terror. “Was that police brutality?” he asked, sincerely. “Because I feel strangely violated.”

Nick turned, his paw gripping the doorknob. He looked forlornly at Judy, making a gentle gesture with his paw to follow.

“Take it from me, kid,” he said as he opened the door. “Buy some Musk-Off.”  
—  
Nick and Judy got back to Flap only a few hours after they’d last left. The ghost-face bat at the reception desk - honestly, Judy couldn’t look away from his jigsaw puzzle of a face; his eyes looked like they’d taken up residence inside his ears - told them that Eva had begun to look terribly unwell. With as exhausted as he and his staff had been recently, Milo was more than understanding, and told her to go home an hour early.

An hour early, as it turned out, was five minutes ago.

Judy and Nick found her sitting quietly on the cable car, at the terminal Cavetop station just outside Flap, waiting for the conductor to pull the lever and start their journey down and through the ND. She didn’t look up as Judy and Nick walked through the open doors and took the open seats on either side of her. Nick fixed his gaze on the PSA from Moonborn Memorial on the other side of the car, urging parents to vaccinate their kits for roundworm and kennel cough.

“I almost didn’t catch your scent on him,” Nick said finally. “Kid was pretty ripe.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much we spend a month on shampoo,” Eva said, thinking of the graveyard of spent Hide & Shells conditioner bottles in her recycling bin. “But it’d be a little suspicious if I came to work smelling like guano.”

“I can understand putting yourself on the line for your partner,” Nick confided, as Judy looked on. Even after Eva had run interference with her charm, Ash had been more than willing to take the fall for the both of them. “I was a little afraid that you’d go down fighting.”

Eva shook her head quietly. “The only fights I ever win are on League of Lemurs.”

“Thank you.” Nick looked at her without even concealing his fondness. “My doctor said I need to cut down on the dramatic paw-chases before bed.”

“I guess I’ll have to take a raincheck on that dinner,” Eva said eventually, looking up. She still couldn’t bear to make eye contact, with either Nick or Judy. “But I think I’ll keep the right to remain silent.”

The bell on the cable car rang, as the doors slid shut and the three of them, plus an oblivious batch of exhausted bats, slid down into the canyon passage.

“You know,” Nick said, a hint of a smile forming as he looked past Eva, and over to Judy. “Ben told me that a handsome arctic hare just started working in records.”


	8. Chapter 8

“This antjera bread is amazing,” Nick marveled, dabbing a ragged piece gently into a small jar of Hopps Farm blueberry marmalade. “It might be even fluffier than Judy’s tail.”

Judy placed a firm paw to Nick’s lips, stopping the makeshift bread pudding roughly in the air as it approached Nick’s mouth. A drop of excess fruit jam seeped from the antjera’s pores and dangled precariously, threatening to dot Nick’s tie.

“Never comment on the mouthfeel of my tail, ever again,” the rabbit warned icily.

“Softer than Bellweather’s wool, then.”

“Keep digging, fox.”

“Right? I love Antelopian food,” Ursula mustered around a mouthful of flavor-rich _deero wat_ , ripping off another piece of the fluffy dinner plate with one paw. “I’m so glad I didn’t feel like cooking while my paw mount is in the shop,” she said, waving her left stump at the freshly-arrived GrubGrub delivery. Ever since David Meowie died, she’d been considering modding her prosthetic to commemorate him; once Pawprints went and died too, that had settled it. She’d finally decided on an acid-etched portrait above her wrist, of both of her heroes singing a duet, the lyrics for “Purple Mane” wrapping in a ribbon down the length of her forearm.

“I happily admit the inferiority of my contribution,” Yoshi remarked, his plate of last-minute shish kebug languishing in the far corner of the table, next to Judy’s spirulina muffins. He’d failed to catch the errant bombardier beetle in his discount Ento-Medley before he slipped it into the oven; the beetle’s infamous ‘anal cannon’ exploded somewhere around the two hundred degree mark, showering his larvae lasagna with a fine veneer of caustic coleopteran ipecac.

“If that oven doesn’t smell like roses by tomorrow,” Ursula announced flatly, “I’m gonna wear your skin as a suit and your skull as a hat.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Speaking of unforgettable smells ruining best-laid plans,” Ursula remarked cheekily, turning to Nick on the far end of the table, “How’s your vampy vixen doing?”

“ _Harsh_ ,” Nick reeled, clutching one paw over his neck where he thought pearls should be. “That burned worse than the beetle.”

“He might still have a chance!” Judy urged, supportively, as Nick attempted to drown his sorrows with marmalade. “She could still plead down to a couple years in minimum security. Maybe even house arrest.” Yoshi shook his head in silence, crunching contemplatively on his bread-wrapped insects; none of his relationships in Newtfoundland had ever required conjugal visits. “I doubt she’ll be allowed to use a computer, so you could totally fill the void,” she said, placing a single paw over Nick’s heart, staring him lovingly in the eyes while stealing a scoop of his blueberries while he was distracted by his rabbit’s show of devotion. “Nothing says ‘emotionally available’ more than letting someone beat you in NarwhalKart.” Nick had never ‘let’ Judy beat him, but he didn’t see why he had to tell Judy that.

Yoshi began to dismantle a kebug, rolling two crickets into a slab of antjera like a tasty miniature sleeping bag. “You could smuggle her a rolled-up love poem in some contraband nip,” he suggested, folding the ends of his bug burrito with his claws. “It worked for Crazy-Nose.”

“ _Orange is the New Musk_ is not reliable dating advice,” Nick reminded him.

“Whatever. Having someone’s boyfriend arrested is a great pick-up line. It might still be most romantic thing Emilie has ever done for me,” Ursula confessed, her eyes fogging at the memory at that fateful night outside the long-shuttered talpid bar, Shindig. “I’m just saying, maybe it could be worse? I once ended up on a blind date with a Yakees fan.”

“I think Ash and Eva are a package deal,” Nick pointed out. “Can’t make bail when your assets are frozen, so they’re both still in detention.”

“I’m not convinced that they could have released Ash, anyway.” Judy put down her pawful of antjera and stood on her chair, leaning directly into Nick’s face until her gleaming eyes occupied almost all of his field of vision. “One could say that he’s…” she said, gripping Nick’s muzzle firmly in her paws like a tender vice, as if she were about to whisper the location of the buried treasure in _The Zoonies_ : “…A _flight risk_.”

“Really?”

“I’m _hilarious_.”

“Let’s back up a hot second,” Nick dovetailed, trying and failing to see around Judy’s irrepressibly self-satisfied face, “to the part where Emilie seduced you with a perp walk.”

“She tells it best. Suffice to say that her black belt in _taeklawdo_ is no joke.”

“Well, when do we get to hear it?” Nick glanced past Ursula to the pup rocker by the kitchen counter, where little Octavia dreamily digested her bellyful of worm hummus and bottled mole milk, her face strobing in the flickering shadows cast through the dining room window, her tiny claws wrapped devotedly around her Krtek plushie. “The pipsqueak is starting to think one of her mamas is a tuatara.” 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ursula fumed. “The hospital’s been a total cave-in recently. They caught a nurse shorting a patient on Tranq, and pocketing the rest. The entire Ear, Snout and Throat ward smells like flop musk,” Ursula complained resignedly, her paw shielding her eyes from the irregular light flitting in from outside. “They started to poach the research staff into walking rounds and doing intakes. What is going on out there?” Ursula pushed herself back from the table impatiently, making her over to the front door and stepping outside.

“Cory!” Ursula called out, walking further onto the patio, the sound of her neighbor’s flapping wings echoing off the cavern walls and raining down onto Ursula’s well-tended rock garden. “While we appreciate the acrobatics, Cory, the Grey Angels show was last week,” the wombat requested tactfully, as her heart-nosed neighbor descended to an inelegant perch atop Ursula’s balcony. “Isn’t it a bit late to be flying laps?”

“Sorry, sorry.” Judy’s ears discretely redirected themselves for a better listening experiences while Nick stole back his fair share of the marmalade that she thought he hadn’t noticed. “I’ve been…just tossing and turning, I guess? I thought maybe I could tire myself out.”

“Cory. I’m a shift worker, and Emilie works at a hospital,” Ursula bargained charitably, as Nick, Judy and Yoshi waltzed their way through the timeless, universal motions of the we’re-not-eavesdropping dance. “We get our sleep meds by the liter. Why didn’t you just ask?”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

“You’re not a bother. Cory, you look like _scat_.” Around the dinner table, the loosely assembled audience stole glances at one another and began to ponder the accepted etiquette of an unwell potluck crasher. “And, Geodesic Dome, you’re _shivering_ ,” Ursula said in mild horror. “Get inside.”

Ursula walked in with an unsteady flying mammal on her arm, leading him to her chair and sitting him down gently but firmly. “How long have you been awake?” she asked, as both Nick and Judy divvied up emergency bat care and fetched a towel and a glass of water, respectively.

“I’m…” Judy returned with the water, which might barely have been enough to make up for the shallow, dehydrated valleys that had taken up residence on Cory’s face. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. Nick wondered, in the dim light, if Cory’s pupils normally looked like dark saucers.

“You’re not sure?” Ursula took the towel from a hovering Nick and wrapped it around Cory’s neck and shoulders. “How long do you think?”

“…The weekend?”

“Since?” Ursula enquired incredulously. “This _weekend_?” She glanced fitfully to her officially aborted dinner party to confirm that they’d heard the same thing, and turned back to her exhausted charge with a face of escalating worry. “Cory. That was _three days ago_.”

“Time flies?” Cory giggled suddenly, as Judy felt the outline of her phone in her pocket with one paw. “Your house sure is bright.”

The glass of water fell one way while Cory fell the other.


	9. Chapter 9

Ursula hadn’t been kidding; Moonborn Memorial had turned into a horror show. Their own sleep-deprived staff had no way to keep up with the stream of delirious, desperate bats that had begun to flood through their doors that night. The symptoms had managed to evade early detection, hiding behind the accepted everyday costs of stressful professions like “ER nurse” and “Flap marketing director.” 

At ZPD, the bullpen was restless. They’d all had basic epizoology training at the academy, but that hadn’t provided much more instruction than how best to park upwind from a camel dung fire. But the idea of a illness that kept you from _sleeping_ \- depriving you of the one reset button that all living creatures could turn to at the end of a horrible day - proved far more horrifying than the occasional outside chance of flea repellent poisoning.

“I’m not saying we should mistreat the guy,” Fangmeyer continued as some of his squad mates looked on, nodding attentively, “but are some precautions really that out of the question?” Nick and Judy craned around in their seats, watching the volatile mixture of apprehension and uncertainty roil its way around the room. “If we still don’t know entirely what we’re dealing with,” the timber wolf argued, “why risk it?”

Bogo took a deep breath from in front of the bullpen’s district map. He wouldn’t admit it, but he knew full well that this scenario was not inside his wheelhouse; he knew about as much about epidemics as could be gleaned from occasionally catching an episode of _Horse_ , or _The Snarling Dead_. Nevertheless, his job description required at least the appearance of informed authority, if not always the sincere feeling of it.

“First,” he began, “As of today, Lightnight has only ever affected bats.” Bogo surveyed the room, his horns arcing across the assembly of officers, only half of whom seemed to take the Center for Epizoology Control’s statement at face value. “Of which we only have one in custody.” Ash had been almost relieved to finger the two middlemammals who’d courted him on Preddit, offering him the prospect of two years’ salary for one night’s work; they’d actually been the ones to both scrape the acquired data for cops _and_ organize the sale. But neither of them, as it turned out, had wings.

“Second,” Bogo enumerated carefully, “given the outbreak, the doctors have gone over Mr. Tuckworth with a fine-tooth comb. He’s completely healthy, if still a little pungent.” The newly-depressed bat could still sleep; his fat reserves remained unscathed; his pupils hadn’t swelled to an unnerving size. “And as long as I’m chief…” Bogo concluded emphatically, “We do not stick mammals down a dark hole without probable cause. Is that clear?”

The rustle of unsatisfied fur against uncomfortable seats filled the room, but no further dissent seemed forthcoming. For now.

“However,” Bogo conceded, as a swarm of ears perked back up. “The safety of my officers will always be my primary concern. And your delightful union rep…” - Francine sat a little straighter in her chair, which actually only brought its legs that much closer to breaking - “has made a compelling case.” Bogo grabbed his case files, to bookend the discussion. “Until further notice, all duty in the Nocturnal District will qualify for hazard pay.”

The siren’s call of a financial windfall noticeably diminished the anxious edge in the room, although nothing could dull it completely until Lightnight had been contained. Nick leaned over to Judy as Bogo assessed the day’s assignments; Fangmeyer could use a spin on parking duty, he decided.

“Potluck next week has been moved to my place,” the fox muttered quietly. “Hadley said she’d make eucalyptus quiche.”  
—  
Ash hung quietly from the precarious perch at the center of his cell; Species Accommodation regulations had at least compelled ZPD to provide him a cell with minimal light, although the single foot-wide bar they’d installed into the ceiling didn’t feel especially secure. He at least had to give credit to ZPD’s humanely up-to-date library collection: he turned the page to the next chapter of “Problematizing Prey” by Janet Minxmane, a stack of brochures for ZTech correspondence courses stacked neatly on the covers of the untouched bunk bed. He’d dogeared the pages for “Applied Horticulture.”

He consciously decided not to look up (down, technically), as he heard the clomp of the guard’s hooves strive purposefully towards his cell. To his mixed feelings of relief and wing-tingling concern, the boar continued on to only the next cell over, where he stopped. He heard the subdued thump of pig flesh on biometric scanner, and the ironically delightful ping of the door coming unlocked. Ash froze in place, listening.

“Sniff, Aria.” Ash relaxed slightly, his eyes unthinkingly taking in the chapter’s opening paragraph over and over in a distracted loop. He heard a begrudging growl as the coywolf in the next cell stepped forward, audibly bristling at the application of cuffs and muzzle. The gates closed again with what sounded like a chipper goodbye from BB-Ate in the latest _Trunk Wars_ sequel. The coywolf started to shuffle discontentedly towards the exit, boar at her side, when she stopped suddenly outside Ash’s cell. The bat stared fixedly somewhere between one line and the other, back on high alert.

“Hey. Bat.” The canid held fast as the boar gave a preliminary tug on the cuff of her detention-issued, pumpkin-colored jumpsuit. “I couldn’t sleep,” Sniff sniffed, aggressively. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Ash hid behind his paperback as he listened to the ensuing scuffle, as the guard dragged the ornery mammal towards the exit. “I counted ten thousand sheep last night,” Aria yelped as they were pushed through the open door, beginning to wrestle with another guard on the other side. “But maybe I only need one bat.” The thick door slammed shut, the coywolf on the other side, her muffled threats still rumbling through the steel and concrete barrier.

Ash shivered from nervous energy. He’d never been in a fight. He preferred to keep it that way, although he didn’t have much faith in his chances. From Sniff’s former cell, he heard the familiar rustle of metallic fur as it nestled against the cell’s front bars. He quickly closed his book, not even bothering to mark his place, and clamored down the bunk beds to the wall that the two cells shared.

“Don’t worry about her,” came a sweet voice from a far more nurturing muzzle, through the bars and into the few feet of quiet hallway that divided them. They’d lucked out when they’d first arrived, that the canid cell abutted Ash’s nocturnal one; now with Aria gone, they could at least maintain the illusion of a private conversation. “She kept herself up all night, muttering a list of people she wanted to maul.” Eva began to rattle off the names herself, their sounds imprinted into her memory by a feral grudge on repeat. “Deartree. Jeffrey. The Mound…”

“You shouldn’t have to listen to that,” Ash lamented, squeezing himself into the corner between the bars and their shared wall.

“I actually started rooting for her, after a while. _Jeffrey_.” Eva wrinkled her nose in instinctive disgust. “Nobody likes you, _Jeffrey_.”

“I mean, you shouldn’t be in here, at all.” Ash fiddled his claws pitifully, nurturing his sorrow for not being able to reach through the wall and feel her snout nuzzle against the inside of his wings. “You’re only in here because of me.”

“I’m in here because of myself,” Eva told him, repeating the line she’d said so many times before in the relatively warm confines of the ND. She pressed one side of her muzzle against the cold wall, the antiseptic chill of her cell weighing on her fur like a blanket made of wet cave moss. “If they could still smell me through the guano stains, it’s safe to say that I’d committed.”

“You almost had dinner with a cop, to protect me.”

“He was very sweet,” Eva pointed out fondly. “In a smackable sort of way.”

“He was.” Ash thought back to the seemingly genuine sympathy he’d received in the interrogation room. “I’m more scared of the bunny.”

“You’ve done everything you can to protect me,” Eva consoled him. “You told them everything you know.” A flurry of seized IP information had brought ZPD to the doors of the two hacker honeytraps who’d enticed them into this situation in the first place: ‘LemurMeringuePie’ actually turned out to be a jaguar who lived in the Rainforest District; ‘HarlotsWeb84’ ended up being a pig farmer in the Tri-Burrows.

“Was it worth it, Eva?” Ash asked. All that smitten woolgathering they’d shared, about making a downpayment on a fruit farm plot in savannah country, and the only thing he could imagine now was years of lowest-bid contract cafeteria slop served in inedible heaps. “Going to prison for a filthy bat?”

“ _My_ filthy bat.” Eva thought back to the giddy glances they’d first stolen at each other, as the humble, hardworking, fox-faced bat hurried along the edges of Flap’s foyer, avoiding the smartly-dressed execs in suits but failing to escape Eva’s attention. “Who else will read me Steer/Bucko fics to help me sleep at night?” Eva wondered rhetorically. “Or feed me cape figs until I’m old and fat?”

“Fruity fox,” Ash mumbled, in romantic awe.

The two future convicts sat quietly in their cells, trying to warm themselves with each other’s distant affection. In the faded light of their cells - it was only an hour or two until midnight - Eva thought back to their first date, however many moons ago. Ash had spent so much time cleaning himself beforehand that he’d almost worn a bald patch into his forehead.

“Ash?” Eva’s voice glided into her bat’s ears in the quiet detention cell, ringing them like attentive bells. “Sing to me?” Ash had never met a mammal with such a love for batshop quartets; he’d learned that on their second date, and just tried to keep up.

Ash took a breath and curled his wings against his body. On the other side of the wall, Eva curled into a small ball on the floor, her blueish-grey tail cushioning her head.

“ _Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer_ …” Ash began to warble, his voice imperfect but earnest. “ _Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer_ …”

_Lead us lest too far we wander_  
_Love's sweet voice is callin' yonder_  
_Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer_  
_Hey there, don't get dimmer, dimmer_  
_Light the path below, above_  
_And lead us on to love_


	10. Chapter 10

Judy sipped some of Nick’s cloudberry tea, reluctantly, as she sank into the driver’s seat of her squad car, parked just a dozen or so meters up the way from the cave entrance. ZPD had been rotating security assignments for the district; as easy as they were, and even with hazard pay, no one was exactly chomping at the bit to volunteer; they could barely get their guards to patrol the detention cells anymore, even after they’d moved Ash to an isolation unit. Judy glumly surveyed the hastily-erected gate in front of her, staffed by a handful of mammals decked out in scrubs and face masks. A small, resigned line of bats lined up on the side of the ND, waiting their turn to shuffle into a small, nondescript metal booth that Judy swore was still somehow the least inviting Port-a-Guano she’d ever seen.

She remembered cramming at the academy for left-field exam questions about the “police power of quarantine,” but the answers had seemed much less authoritarian on paper. As soon as the ‘spillover’ occurred - when a canid was first officially diagnosed with Lightnight, the disease having apparently jumped the species barrier - the CEC had scrambled to set up checkpoints outside every entrance and exit of the ND. In the past couple weeks, doctors had at least managed to discern the cause and develop an accurate test for the “bat blight,” as some were still calling it, which helped to quell some of the panic in the rest of the city.

But neither the diagnostics, nor knowing that it was caused by a fungus that disrupted circadian rhythms, seemed like much consolation. Some of the residents in the exam line were shivering; the CEC had also ordered the ND to vent most of their waste heat, for fear that the warm air circulation was contributing to the spread.

Judy felt her thigh begin to buzz, as her phone glowed bright with a picture of Nick’s lovably intolerable face. It was a wonder she got any reception at all; with most mobile internet workers paying mortgages in the epicenter of Lightnight, day-to-day phone tower maintenance had taken a bit of a backseat.

“Hey,” Judy sighed into her phone, as she watched a yellow-wing try to calm her pups, who’d immediately started crying at the sight of the terrifying coypu wreathed in sterile white plastic. A library copy of _Working the Night Shift: A History of Bat Settlement in Zootopia_ rested on Judy’s vacant passenger seat. “Tell me something that isn’t horribly depressing,” she pleaded.

“Well, we’ve got the crib set up,” Nick told her, in an active attempt of good cheer. “And Hadley is playing her woo-woo box for Octavia. Hold on a second.” Judy heard a muffled cacophony of voices from all through Nick’s apartment; everyone involved had happily agreed to install Ursula and her cub into Nick’s apartment for the foreseeable future, although Emilie obviously had to stay behind in the ND to fight the good fight. By the time Moonborn had realized what was happening and instituted universal infection control protocols, a third of its bat staff had gotten an exhausting whiff of Lightnight themselves.

Nick’s voice came back into focus, his voice failing to conceal a layer of astonished schadenfreude. “Octavia just peed,” he explained perkily. “I told Hadley to take it as a compliment, but the kid’s got aim.” Judy closed her eyes and caught herself smiling, as Hadley’s tinny voice screamed out from - she imagined - the bathroom. “IT GOT INTO MY POUCH,” she could hear the koala lament, as if starring in her own Shakesbearian tragedy. “HOW IS IT IN MY POUCH.”

“I had to arrest a pup school teacher,” Judy recounted mournfully, Hadley’s frenzied cleaning provided a backdrop to a impromptu sonnet of koala curses. “He refused to get screened. The health workers got pushy, and he pushed back.”

“Do you blame him?” she heard Nick empathize back to her. “We get antsy having to pee in a cup every six months. Imagine doing it every day just to leave your house.” Insomnia, shivering, dilated pupils - none of the visible symptoms of Lightnight could be relied upon as accurate diagnostics. The only way to know for sure, the CEC had determined, was to check for elevated levels of a kind of sugar alcohol in the body; unfortunately for the dignity of everyone involved, urine was a lot easier to sample than plasma or cerebrospinal fluid. Past the quarantine gate, she watched as a rousette fruit bat exited the freestanding toilet and handed over a plastic cup filled with a few ounces of personal grey waste. The bat refused to make eye contact with the businesslike medical tech.

“It doesn’t seem right, Nick.”

“Yeah, well.” Judy heard a burst of unorganized electronic bugaboos as Octavia apparently toyed with Hadley’s theremin in her absence. “There’s a pile of compost in the alley right now that’s knee-high to a giraffe. I passed the Groomtongues Hall on the way to pick up Ursula,” Nick said, referring to Zootopia’s Streets & Sanitation union. “They’re having a fish fry and fruit bowl fundraiser tonight to support their members. Half their night staff lives in the ND.”

“You should go,” Judy told him earnestly. “I’ll still be here.”

“We’ll bring home a pile of cantaloupe for you.”

“Cantaloupe is for chumps,” Judy explained for the millionth time. “It’s the mangy, dimwitted stepcousin of the melon family.”

“You’re so close-minded, Carrots.” Nick paused on the other end of the line. “I’ll see you when you get home.”

“Home,” Judy repeated, rubbing the side of her face with her free paw as she imagined Nick’s tail occupying its unfair share of the bed. “See you tonight.”

Judy returned the silenced phone to its temporary home atop the police radio. She would rather have made co-habitation decisions without being preemptively prompted by a public health panic. If Nick’s books ever started to move over, as well, she would have to initiate a very serious discussion about shelf space.

The knock on her passenger side window shook her out of her adult-worries reverie. She glanced over with a start, but quickly relaxed as she hit the unlock button. As the well-groomed canid popped open the door and slid into the car beside her, stashing Judy’s book politely on the dash, the rabbit readily admitted that she could have done much worse for company; Wolfard always seemed to steer the conversation towards a subtle pitch for Genus, his one true lord and savior.

“Hey, um…” Judy began. This was embarrassing. “Zoe.”

Pupslasher barked a gentle, forgiving laugh as Judy’s cheeks flushed slightly. “My parents still won’t believe me that cops are so demure about hyena names,” she said. Truth be told, Pupslasher was actually her great-great-grandmother’s old military title, and a pretty tame one at that; one rank further up, and Zoe could have been born a Baculumbreaker. “You should be there when I’m running late at the airport, trying to catch a flight,” Zoe chuckled, scooting the passenger seat backwards in an attempt to obtain a modicum of legroom for the next several hours. “Most awkward loudspeaker announcements ever.”

“You’re not wearing a mask?” Judy asked, her eyes only now processing the sight of Zoe’s naked muzzle. None of the other canids on the force would come near the ND now, hazard pay or not.

“Actually,” Zoe smiled graciously, “hyenas are feliform. We’re basically cats on canid steroids.” Judy’s cheeks flushed gently underneath her fur; she should have known that. “Besides, the last thing these folks need is to think that even cops are afraid to help them,” Zoe reasoned amicably, looking over at Judy with a blasé but dutiful shrug. The hyena retrieved the folded up news daily that she’d been carrying under one arm, unfolding it with a flourish of her paw and passing it to the side. “Have you seen this trash?” she asked, in almost endearing distress.

Judy took in the banner headline in a flash: it was the latest cover of _The Moon_ , one of those sensationalist, Furdock-owned rags like the _Zootopia Post_. “SUCKER PUNCHED,” it screeched, in Boardoni Black font, accompanied by a mugshot of a thick-snouted dire wolf and a cell phone photo of a bruised and battered bat, bleeding slightly from his long nose. “Roger Grottoson, an employee for the bat-owned Squeak Squad,” the article began, “got a taste of his own blood when…”

Judy tossed the garbage print over the gear shift with a huff; every half-wit journalist in town had been running the “cellar peril” angle into the ground. “Those crop weevil hacks,” she fumed in disgust. “They wouldn’t know a real vampire bat even if one did decide to bite them.” She was still learning herself, but even a cursory Zoogle Image search could have revealed a proboscis like that to be the trademark of a fruit or nectar bat, just like 90+% of all the bats in Zootopia.

“Bigoted assumptions, eh?” Zoe remarked quietly, staring out at the unshrinking line on the other side of the wire fence. “What do either of us know about those?”


	11. Chapter 11

Nick stared fiercely at the spread of identical, opaque, numbered vials in front of him. His face had taken on a grim expression, shot through with concentration underpinned by shaky confidence. His nose twitched, as he looked across the table and nodded.

“Hit me,” he said.

Judy plucked a vial at random and handed it to him. Closing his eyes, he held the substance a few inches in front of his snout, and waved one paw gently over the open end towards his snout. He took a steady breath, nodding all the while.

“Mushroom-like. Metallic.” His eyes opened again, relaxed and at peace with his choice. “Oct-1-en-3-one,” he announced.

Judy consulted the answer key attached to her clipboard, which she kept tilted out of Nick’s view while trying to sit comfortably in the hard plastic chairs of ZTech’s Sensory Analysis lab. “Oct-1-en-3-one,” it read. “Odor detection threshold: 0.03–1.12 µg/m3. Main compound responsible for the ‘smell of metal,’ followed by decanal (orange skin, flowery) and neonatal (tallowy, fruity).” The rest of the Aroma Profile quiz read similarly, like something out of a florist’s worst nightmare.

(This wasn’t entirely accurate. Emmitt Otterton’s worst nightmare, for example, was finding that his favorite rock had been replaced by another shinier, but obviously inferior rock. As soon as he realized this, a raccoon in a spacesuit would grab him by the shoulders and start screaming, in exasperated panic: “ _WHAT DO YOU STILL HAVE IT FOR?!_ ” The raccoon appeared to be accompanied by a walking tree.)

“Correct,” Judy said, looking up proudly. “I’m beginning to think that your nose is the smartest part about you,” she warned him, winking.

“The rest of me has simpler tastes.”

“The rest of you is less of a snob, you mean?”

“Hit me.”

“Always.”

Judy handed over another vial, which looked exactly like all the others. Nick went through the same procedure as before, but handed the vial back after literally one wave of his paw. “Trans-4,5-epoxy-(E)-2-decenal,” he announced, almost looking bored as he did so.

“That was fast.”

“It’s the smell of blood. Even bunnies could spot it.”

“Charmer.” Judy looked over the array of choices, plucked one of them out of its slot with a decided pluck of her paw, and placed it gently into Nick’s palm. He wrapped his paw around the vial and brought it to its designated sniffing position, fanning one paw towards his face with a newfound spring in his step. His brow furrowed, and he closed his eyes as his paw ushered another couple wafts into his well-trained nostrils.

“Moderate intensity solvent note. Acetate. Probably ethyl acetate; amyl acetate would be more banana-like.” Judy looked down at her sheet and maintained a steady poker face. “Other fruity notes. Lemon-lime,” Nick continued, his confidence wavering. “Aggressively musty, like dry dirt on the sidewalk; methylisoborneol.” The satisfaction of that identification pushed him onward, his nasal cavities tingling. “Pungency. Bit of cooling, like menthol.” Another waft, and his eyes opened just enough to allow for a disappointed squint. “And…cardboard? Some of the compounds in here have been oxidizing.” He looked at Judy, transparently stumped and self-conscious. “I have no idea what this is,” he admitted at last.

Without speaking, Judy reached over to take the vial into her paw. Drawing it towards her chest, she flicked the latch on one side, and inverted the vial directly over the tabletop. A small piece of orange plastic clattered onto the its surface, the tip of the carrot highlighter pen dotting the cold metal with a faint dab of purple before falling flat to one side. Nick looked at the pen, and then to Judy’s smug, expectant face.

“Say it,” she said. “Say it for me.”

Nick sighed as he reclined back into his seat, his eyes narrowing at his partner as his lips turned up at the corners. “You’re a very clever bunny,” he indulged her.

“Nope,” she said, leaning back and returning his gaze. “Still hasn’t gotten old.”

Nick felt a minor buzzing next to his crotch. Without breaking eye contact, he retrieved his phone and swiped his paw over Ursula’s somehow-photogenic attempt at duckface. “Where’s it at, wombat?” he drawled, Judy shaking her head in nonplussed patience as she considered the remaining vials. Looking up, her eyes grew wider as she watched the flirtatious ease leave Nick’s face, replaced by a countenance that reeked of active worry.

“Where is he?” Nick looked across at Judy with a sense of sudden urgency as she grabbed both their things. “We’ll be there.”  
—  
Silence reigned within the spartan confines of the Interclass Student Union. Nick and Judy walked through the doors, their fur standing on end, only to find a slightly flummoxed platypus at the reception desk, jarred out of the pages of her light reading ( _Zootopian on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Mammal_ , by Craig Feathersong). Glancing around furtively, Nick caught a glimpse of some crested scales, peaking over the edge of a ratty couch and within paw’s reach of a criminally empty coffeepot.

He and Judy rounded the corner to find Yoshi - and an unnamed corvid - speaking in hushed tones to one another, the raven’s eyes moist with concern and Yoshi’s jaw set with slowly-processing inner turmoil. Both creatures looked startled at the sudden sight of Nick and Judy, as they discretely released their grips on each other’s talons.

“I told Ursula not to say anything,” Yoshi chided, turning to face them. “I’m fine.”

‘YOU’RE MISSING A LIMB,” Judy shouted in irrepressible shock, gesturing with both paws at Yoshi’s recently-abridged backside.

“It’ll grow back,” Yoshi assured her, unsuccessfully. “You should see the other guy,” he added, trying to keep his well-meaning rabbit acquaintance from hyperventilating. “These things have a mind of their own when they break off.”

Nothing smacked the xenophobia out of a mammal’s mouth, Yoshi thought, quite like the raw end of a disembodied reptile tail; he’d actually quite enjoyed watching the flying squirrel get his comeuppance, more than he ever would have enjoyed filing an assault and battery charge. He thought back to the sweet, bosom-swelling sight of his attacker, desperately crawling away on all fours, as a seemingly possessed rudder-snake pinned him to the floor of the ZTA car. “GRASSNUTS,” the rodent had screamed in abject terror. “OH SWEET GRASSNUTS.”

“Why would they take it out on a reptile?” Judy said, rolling over Nick’s summary of the event in her mind (he had actively bared his teeth while trying to relay the attacker’s words: “herp;” “slit-tongue;” “Gorn”). “If anything, they’re the one who resembles a bat,” Judy tried to reason.

“I’m still a creature that most people don’t understand,” Yoshi brushed off curtly, not feeling like explaining the matter further. The bird to one side didn’t seem thrilled by the company either, but sternly poked one talon into Yoshi’s shoulder nonetheless. He turned to her and lowered his head slightly, as if apologetic.

“But while you’re here,” Yoshi hedged, “Melody wanted to talk to you,” he said, gesturing loosely between the assembled parties in reluctant introduction. “She’s interning at the Epizoology Intelligence Service. She has questions about your bat.” Nick and Judy’s ears perked up, as they directed their attention to the two eyes that sat on either side of a gently-rounded beak, coated in fine layers of black feather.

“Sure, sure,” Nick defused diplomatically, turning his full attention to the shy passerine at Yoshi’s side, as Judy feverishly attempted to keep her eyes from darting towards Yoshi’s newfound stump. “What can we do for you?”

“The EIS has been mapping out the Lightnight cases at Flap.” Melody said, in an accent with a gentle cadence that reminded Nick of whistled opera. “Like drawing a web of possible contacts.”

“Sure,” Judy followed along, confidently. “Dot maps, index cases…”

“You know about this?” Nick queried to his wildly capable partner, a little bit too incredulously.

“It’s not quite the same, but rabbits know their plant disease epidemiology. Ever since Jane Harefrost pinpointed the source of a willow blight.” Judy fixed Nick with a stare that suggested that if he ever underestimated her again, she’d trim his tailbone with her teeth.

“It hasn’t worked,” Melody continued, her trill echoing forlornly against the inside of her beak. Both Nick and Judy’s ears drooped slightly, as if in concert. “All we found was moderate resistance among fruit bats; we haven’t been able to find a pattern of infection. It’s as if we’re missing a piece of the puzzle.” The raven stole a glance at Yoshi, who nodded to her in unspoken support. “We haven’t said anything publicly. If we’re wrong, it could make things even worse. But…” she confided painfully, tactful but unbearably anxious. “We’re worried that there are carriers.”

“Oh, Beta H. Carotene,” Judy muttered.

“People who are infectious but don’t show it,” Nick lamented, burying his face in one paw. “Toxoplasma Marys.” He turned to Judy, crestfallen. “That would explain the outbreak in detention. They’re keeping him isolated more for optics; Ash is testing clean. They thought Sniff caught it from her weekly poker night in the ND. But if Ash is…” Nick fretted.

“Intermittent, and asymptomatic…” Judy rattled off the looming worse-case scenario.

“Melody wants to know,” Yoshi interjected, shouldering the task of the hard ask, “If there’s anything else you can find out about Ash.” Yoshi glanced to Melody, his scales glowing slightly with fondness. “Anything that could help her figure out if he’s the missing piece of the puzzle.”

Nick and Judy looked at one another, drawing from a deep well of silent communication, honed through nigh-endless nights of smarmy bickering, before they both squared their shoulders with an appearance of authority. Judy turned tail and strode out of the student union without another word, already rolling over old pestilence case studies in her head. Nick turned to the two fledgling Zootopians and extended a single, supportive paw.

“You handle your evidence,” he told them. “We’ll handle ours.”


	12. Chapter 12

The two small boxes sat side by side on the plain metal table. The sterile hum of the climate-controlled evidence locker droned above Nick and Judy’s heads, impassively. Judy looked over to Nick, who was busy slipping on a pair of latex gloves and a heavy-duty snout mask. He kind of looked like Michael Jackleson, during his weird germaphobe period.

Judy looked Nick up and down, satisfied, and handed him an inventory list. “If I see you take that mask off,” she promised him, slipping on her own set of body substance isolation gear, “I’ll gonna plug a pair of carrot pens up your nostrils.”

“I’d prefer a bowl of your dad’s kale ramen soup,” Nick requested. Marvelous chef, that Stu. Made an impressively mean _beetbimbap_.

They both stepped forward - Judy to Eva’s evidence, Nick to Ash’s. Considering how they’d apparently been two peas in a pod, they figured that a little bit of potential overlap in evidence was inevitable. Judy cracked open the clear plastic container and rummaged through the unsurprisingly spartan contents of two underemployed young mammals. Judy pulled out the first thing she came across: a glossy flyer about a ticket giveaway, for the bat musical that everyone had been obsessed about before Lightnight hit.

“At least we know he had good taste in theatre,” Judy said, holding up the promotional _Hangilton_ playbill for Nick to see.

Nick held one paw clenched to his chest and raised his snout with dramatic purpose. “The _wooooorld_ turned upside _dooooown_ …”

“Focus, Nick.”

“Killjoy.” Nick carefully withdrew a potted plant from its resting place, taking care to avoid the sharp coat of spines on his BSI gloves. “One baby saguaro cactus plant,” he read off his own inventory sheet before placing it gingerly back on the table. He retrieved a plastic bag that contained a small, seemingly self-published pamphlet. “One guide to DIY Essential Oils and Perfumes,” he enumerated. His nose caught a whiff of sweet-smelling musk which reminded him of the reception desk at Flap.

“One _Stoney Planet_ guide for Zanzoobar,” Judy listed.

“That is an out-of-the-way holiday destination.”

“‘Now with Freddie Furcurry flying tour!’” she added, reading the blurb off the front cover.

“I take it back. That is a noble pilgrimage.” Nick returned his gaze to the next item in his paw. “One well-loved DVD of Katharine Flapburn’s ‘Bringing Down Baby,’” he noted approvingly; Eva was a vixen of many tastes. Nick appraised the DVD cover, which featured a glamorous red-haired bat trying to coax an obviously terrified jaguar infant into releasing his grip on a narrow stalactite. “A half-dozen empty cans of Bite,” Nick continued, surveying the energy drink massacre before him. He could smell the Trans-4,5-epoxy-(E)-2-decenal through the plastic evidence bags. It really did smell like the real thing, he admitted.

“Three empty bottles of fig-flavored Fang-goo,” Judy said, placing the bargain basement fruit soda to one side. Wasn’t that the same stuff that the Buggalos always drank? Insane Clown Possum? This poor kid and his poorer life choices, Nick thought woefully.

“One adorable treasure box of assorted herbal teas,” the fox detailed, as the box stood newly barren before him. By the looks of it, these kids’ laptops had made up half their worldly possessions, but they were still in the paws of Digital Forensics as they built their case against the hapless hackers. “And one jar of manuka honey.”

“What is it with charming foxes and their tea?” Judy muttered, appraising the snapshot of workaday hopes and dreams that now littered the table around her similarly vacant box.

“Well, we have to let our sexiness steep.”

“Is that why it’s a diuretic?” Judy countered. “All the sweating, and then needing to pee an hour later?”

“I love you.”

Both cops looked over the table with keen, diligent eyes. They’d both investigated cases with less leads than this one, with fruitful results. They’d solved murders, interrupted conspiracies, and read the inscrutable body language of long-time partners who may or may not have left the dishes undone on purpose, _that dumb/clever fox/bunny_.

“That was…” Nick began, his paws perched upon his hips as if scrutinizing a family heirloom on _Antique Rodentshow_.

“Incredibly unhelpful,” Judy agreed solemnly. She slumped onto the stool on which she’d been standing, in a fit of frustrated pique.

It’s not that either of them had any idea what they’d been looking to find; fumbling in the dark for clues was part of the job. But the feeling of coming up empty-pawed couldn’t help but cut a bit deeper when there wasn’t a criminal on the loose, but a tragedy: hundreds of infected Zootopians had been running on fumes for weeks, grabbing desperately at sporadic, half-baked moments of unconsciousness that were about as restful as the weightlessness you felt while falling off a cliff. Nick couldn’t think of a worse illness to have, and he’d once secured some not-quite-approved pharmaceuticals for an elephant with scrotal rot.

“You are right about one thing, though,” Nick said finally, trying his best to sooth the sense of failure they were both experiencing.

“I’m right about a million things, fox,” Judy huffed. “But go on.”

“My nose has become a snob,” he said, reaching over to pick up the bag filled with loose bottles of Fang-Goo. “I can smell the artificial flavoring from here,” he observed in disgusted wonderment. “I’m pretty sure they manufacture the aromas for this stuff in a factory off the Moo Jersey Turnpike.” Judy shook her head in their established code for loving indulgence, with a moderate chance of punching. “Down the road from where they buried Jimmy Hoofa,” Nick clarified, not entirely joking.

“In your new career as a food critic,” Judy mumbled, her body going slack over the stool seat, so that both her head, ears and feet dangled in parallel towards the evidence room floor, “your penchant for one-star reviews will never be welcome in my kitchen.”

“Look at the ingredients on this thing. Fuchsia-40. Rhino Rhub.” He jangled the plastic bag in Judy’s general direction. “Would you eat something that came pre-rubbed by a rhino?” he asked teasingly, as Judy’s face lolled to one side in a marathon of tested emotional endurance. “Just imagine McHorn,” Nick crooned, “lovingly caressing your carrot sta…”

“MOTHER FUNGUS, NO.” Judy’s whole body seized into a fetal position on top of the stool, the pads of her paws trying to scour her eyeballs like steel wool. “That’s the most appalling mental image you’ve conjured up all week,” she scolded venomously, in a newfound mixture of retch and guffaw.

“I try.” Nick always made sure to take pride in his work, however small.

“Too bad you eat Rhino Rhub every day, skunkbutt,” Judy informed him triumphantly, as Nick felt the bantering table turn against him. “It’s a soil inoculant, _Rhodococcus rhodochrous_. Keeps fruit from ripening too quickly,” Judy narrated loosely, like a plant husbandry savant. “My parents use it to introduce ‘systemic acquired resistance’ for all sorts of blights. Powdery mildew, take-all, leaf spot, root rot…”

“Carrots,” Nick said suddenly.

“So McHorn is all up in _your_ blueberry patch, you filthy…” Judy barreled on.

“CARROTS.” Judy’s mouth slammed shut with the zinger still inside, her eyes glimmering with rage for having her comic timing taken from her. She glowered at Nick, who continued to stare pointedly at the fruit soda ingredient list with a look of dumbfounded epiphany. As Judy rolled over her last words in her own head, her face began to fall into the same, gobsmacked expression.

“You sound remarkably like an epizoology lecture,” the dumb fox said to his sly bunny.


	13. Chapter 13

“So I was…” Ash struggled to condense down his diagnosis into the simplest of terms. “ _Shedding insomnia?_ ” he asked, in lingering disbelief.

“That’s not a half-bad description,” the mole doctor said approvingly. Nick, Judy, and Dr. Novanose huddled around Ash’s bed, refreshingly unencumbered by several layers of plastic infection control. As responsibly as they could, the hospital staff had just the previous night thrown a scrub-burning bonfire in the hospital incinerator. There was talk of hiring an artist to paint a Lightnight Victory mural, but it was still just talk.

“Since when is insomnia infectious?” Ash asked the attendant physician, as relieved to be healthy again as to talk to another mammal without being looked at as if he were a weeping sebaceous cyst on a peccary penis.

“We can’t know for sure, although I’d wager that spending a few years hip-deep in guano didn’t do you any favours.” The doctor clasped her clipboard against her chest and leaned forward with an air of subtle conspiracy. “At least in the break room, the leading theory is that some regulatory proteins from the Bite Energy intermingled with some fungal prions, which then piggybacked on a mild chest infection…” The doctor shrugged with the giddy ignorance of a true research scientist who’d just found a new toy. “We’re still figuring this out ourselves. It’s basically the talk of the transgenetic therapy wards,” she gushed. “You might have a new cell line named after you! I’m kind of jealous.”

The application of the Rhino Rhub had worked wonders on fighting off the infection, even in advanced cases; it also explained the observed but not universal resistance in fruit bats. Nick still couldn’t bring himself to believe that a plague had been cut off at the knees by a fruit soda that smelled of cheap plastic and bounced checks. The Rhub had even been easy to transmit as an aerosol; HVAC engineers in the ND had fed it into the air vents, effectively distributing it throughout the cave system. There would still be spot fires to put out every now and again, but that would no more challenging for the time being than popping an Nyquill for the sniffles.

“Anyhow. I’ll leave you all alone for a bit,” Dr. Novanose said, backing graciously out of the room. Before escaping into the hallway, she took a moment to kindly nod to all four of them: Nick, Judy, Ash, and a telepresence robot by Ash’s bedside, where Eva’s live-streamed face glowed attentively from the screen of a tablet, her grinning muzzle almost entirely drowning out the dour tones of her jail cell in the background. Bogo wouldn’t go so far as to release a potential flight risk, even for a escorted hospital visit. But, remote technology abides.

“Also,” the doctor cautioned suddenly, popping her head back around the door. “Some creeps from FURPA have been sniffing around.” Nick’s eyebrows arched at the offpaw mention of the mad scientists at Futurists United Research Projects Agency; they’d funded some insane-sounding military defense projects more than once. “We think they caught the scent of a possible airborne bioweapon. If anyone asks, you’re not allowed unscheduled visitors. Doctor’s orders.” With _that_ casual aside, the mole finally disappeared back into the bustling corridors.

“Seems only fair,” Nick said, turning to Ash, who gazed rapturously at his sweet vixen’s high-definition face. “Give a virus, get a virus.”

“Technically,” both the bat and rabbit began in unison, “it wasn’t a…”

“Poetic license.”

“Thank you for coming to see us,” Eva said, glancing to all parties from the comfort of her screen. “You didn’t have to.”

“Well, this one needed closure,” Nick told the vixen glibly, gesturing to the bunny beside him who’d begun to crush one of his hind paws under hers. “By which I mean Officer Hopps wanted to reaffirm her unstoppable commitment to truth and justice,” he smiled through clenched teeth.

“ _Unflappable_ , even,” Judy added.

“Please don’t.”

“Our lawyers say we might be able to transfer to an open prison after a year or two,” Ash told Nick with a level of relief he’d never expected to associate with the prospect of jail time. An open prison, which could be reminiscent of a university dorm and might even let them work off-site, at least provided an illusion of freedom; Nick opted not to drive home the karma of wearing an electronic monitoring anklet that would broadcast their whereabouts to ZPD around the clock. “I won’t say that it’s not a depressing thought,” Ash continued, glancing apprehensively at Eva. “But we’ll still have our lives ahead of us.”

“You came a snout’s length away from tanking thousands of mammals’ credit histories, because you were idiots,” Judy told Ash, as both he and Eva’s faces drooped with the reminder. “Not to mention the foxfire sale we only barely managed to avert.” Their instant cooperation in reeling in the bigger fish - or in their case, a jaguar and a pig - had bought them some leeway, but not enough to spare them some opprobrium from ZPD’s rabbit officer.

“However,” Nick intervened. “I happen to know a lemming who has some pull with the judge in your case.” Nick couldn’t very well appeal to the judge directly, at least for appearance’s sake, but he did still have some loyal customers who’d been mourning his absence from the happy hour pawpsicle business. “A couple of naïve and lovestruck kids, on their first non-violent offense, in over their head. The same facility?” He shrugged noncommittally, not wanting to make any promises. “Maybe with good behavior,” he cautioned. “I’d recommend spending a lot of time in the library.”

“You always recommend that,” Judy reminded him.

“It’s always true.”

The telepresence robot pinged the day’s two-minute warning, prompting the bat and vixen to glance at each other expectantly. The other fox in the room began to move towards the door, his rabbit in tow. “Keep your noses clean, you two,” he instructed them. “No more terrible hustles.”

“Thank you, Nick,” they heard Eva say, as they made their out of the room to provide space for a private goodbye.

“Goodbye, Eva,” Nick bid adieu over one shoulder.

They walked down the hallway arm-in-arm, Judy’s chest almost bursting with the pride of a job well done. Nick turned his face down towards hers, remembering the dirty details of the post-Lightnight life.

“We’ve got to get back to my place. Pack up Ursula and her cub.” Judy nodded in understanding. “Her crib is from ITREEA. It’s like dismantling a Ribex cube.”

“You know,” Judy wondered out loud, gripping Nick’s paw a little tighter. “After all this time, I’ve almost gotten used to putting up with your tail hogging all the covers.” She glanced up at Nick, who listened with cautious interest. “It might almost be tolerable on a nightly basis,” she offered, her mind calculating the cubic footage of her own possessions and overlaying it onto Nick’s apartment. “With a bigger bed, I mean.”

“Big investment,” Nick warned.

“Not if we go halfsies.”

“I wouldn’t have to move my books,” Nick realized pleasantly.

“…We’ll talk.”

“We will,” Nick urged, as they stepped through the opening doors of Moonborn Memorial. “Now c’mon. Finnick and I have to go melt down a jumbo pop for a lemming lawyer’s brother’s son’s bar _mousevah_ ,” he said, with blatant nostalgia. “Those judges don’t butter up themselves.”

“You know,” Judy mused, holding up one arm towards the red-hued cave lights, her fur glowing a faint cherry. “I think I could be a pawpsicle model,” she announced with pride.


	14. Chapter 14

_Dearest Glow-worm_ , the letter began, Ash’s Department of Mammal Corrections number written clearly in the top-left corner. _Foxfire of My Heart_ :

_I could write all day about how much I miss you, but if I start that I’ll never be able to stop. So how about this:_

_I’ve been thinking of the crappy respirators that Flap used to give us, and have been reading up on liability law…_

Eva repressed a loving snort from atop the over-starched sheets of her cot. Ash wrote her a letter every other day, without fail, from the minimum security prison on the other side of the Tri-Burrows. Three months after their sentencing, their lawyers were filing a petition for a transfer; Ash was lobbying to move to the nocturnal wing of Eva’s prison, if only because she had been singing the praises of their vintage movie and music library.

Eva smoothed out Ash’s letter on her bed and reached for her drink. She never thought she’d admit that she missed the taste of Bite, but the favored synthetic energy of hackers everywhere had become a nightly ritual for her during her late-night gaming sessions. She might be able to barter for it with some of the bats in the mail room, but that was a lot of grey market hosiery and nip to trade for an admittedly subpar energy drink.

She took a sip instead of her berry-flavoured Fang-goo, relishing the knowledge she at least had something she could indulge in at the commissary. She swallowed, and took a deep breath, basking in Ash’s doting words; she liked to drink it with every letter, considering how he’d made her a fan of the stuff in the first place. She definitely missed being at the hub of such a whirlpool of social energy, as she’d been at Flap. But at least she had _her_ bat.

She took another sip. In the quiet of the night, without any muss or fuss, the Rhino Rhub kept Patient Zero at bay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for coming, everybody! If you’re still here after all that science talk, my beta suggested that some readers might be interested in seeing an appendix, a “deep cut” of references that might not be obvious to anyone but the author (me!). But if you’re not as big of a dork as I am, I don’t blame you. :) Onward to nerddom!: [https://goo.gl/uNkfdp]


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